The moment when burial takes place is the time when the irrevocable nature of mortality, its brutal certainty, is most keenly felt. Rosetta’s sisters are in tears again; their husbands, affecting a manly stoicism, purse their mouths and look grim. Some of the younger family members, Rosetta’s nieces and nephews, are shocked by the sight of the freshly dug, yawning pit. They are unused to the raw confrontation of interment. The young men catch one another’s eyes then look away, too ill at ease even for a half-hearted attempt at nonchalance.
Tom, who held Rosetta in his arms just two days previously, watched as she drew her last breath, is unexpectedly stricken. The loss is naked now. He knows that he will never meet another woman possessed of such bewitching, thrilling force. He shivers, conscious for the first time of the meaning of Rosetta’s death. Standing by his wife’s grave under a grey winter sky, he feels cold and dispirited.
Reverend Krass steps forward, leads the distressed band of mourners in their prayers to God.
‘Thou sustainest the living with loving kindness, quickenest the dead with great mercy, supportest the falling, healest the sick, loosest the bound, and keepest thy faith to them that sleep in the dust.’
Slowly, with straining muscles and trembling arms, the pallbearers lower the casket, heavy as the most wretched heart.
‘May she rest in peace,’ the Reverend says, as the first damp clod of earth is cast.
SIXTY-ONE
Randwick Cemetery, a small hillside necropolis surrounded by neat, red-brick houses and suburban streets, is Rosetta’s final resting place. My father went there to investigate. More than two decades later, I follow him. At the time of my visit, admittedly mid-week and on a day of harsh, dry heat, there is not another soul in sight. There are no grieving mourners, no curious members of the public, nor even a caretaker to help find the right grave. It is not so much an eerie place as desolate, filled with dry weeds and bleached stone, barren in the blazing light.
Dad discovered that there were three graves in a row, for here lies my great, great-grandmother Fanny and great, great-grandfather Lewis, as well. According to the records Dad unearthed, this triple burial site, located in Section A, cost one pound ten shillings. Towards the very end of the trusty blue folder, he included one sheet of paper on which were typed his observations.
Although not an ostentatious grave, it [reflects] considerable expenditure for the times. A broad expanse of burnished brown tiles, three headstones of a similar design and all … executed in conformity with a pre-determined pattern.
He also noted that there were few Jewish graves, and those that did exist were surrounded by hundreds more from other religious persuasions. I think Rosetta, an aficionado of so many faiths, would have enjoyed being at the centre of this ecumenical assembly of the departed.
My great-grandmother’s grave is broken and battered. I peer at the words on the tombstone, for weathering has blurred their edges, but they contain no revelations. Indeed, particularly when one considers her vivid character and the remarkable life she led, the inscription is dull and formulaic. ‘In loving memory of Rosetta Tait’ is all it says.
After my father recorded these nondescript words he wrote, ‘No more, no less.’
Like him, I am struck by the inadequacy of the epithet.
I turn to go, then turn back, filled with the strangest feeling. I realise that, at this stage in my journey of discovery, my great-grandmother has become like a story-book character to me. She might have inhabited the pages of the myths and legends that I used to read as a child in the East Lindfield mobile library. Rosetta is transcendent, fantastic; a creature from a dream.
Yet here I am, and there can be few things more tangible than a grave in a cemetery. After all, what is a grave but proof, should proof be needed, of existence?
Something shifts. I drop to my knees, run my fingers over the cracked tiles and whisper, ‘Once, you lived.’
Rosetta drew up her Last Will and Testament on 12 August 1957, a year before she died. The Union Trustee Company of Australia Ltd has been appointed sole executor and trustee. Immediately after the funeral Rosetta’s adviser, a fellow Tom has never met, comes up to him and says, ‘I want to see you at nine o’clock tomorrow in my office, 2 O’Connell Street.’ It seems a bit abrupt, but all the same, he presents himself.
Rosetta’s family is there as well, assembled in a dark, wood-panelled room for the reading of the will. There is consternation in the office of the Union Trustee Company when Mr B.C. Menzies, the company officer responsible for Rosetta’s affairs, announces her bequests. Rosetta’s sisters Ivy and Evelyn each receive two hundred and fifty pounds. Florence is given two still-life paintings of fruit and flowers by the fashionable Edwardian artist Giovanni Barbaro; they had originally belonged to Lilian.
Father Riley is bequeathed fifty pounds.
Then Clause 5 of Rosetta’s will is read:
I give and bequeath all the rest and residue of my personal Estate and devise all my Real Estate of or to which I may be … possessed or entitled or over which I shall then have any power of testamentary disposition unto my husband Thomas Reginald Rufus Tait absolutely …
All the land, the houses and the flats, everything goes to Rosetta’s young husband.
Tom, conscious of the strained atmosphere, protests: he didn’t know until then that the property would be left to him. (Many years later, when talking to my father, he will claim, ‘I had no idea,’ before confiding, ‘the sisters were pretty upset.’)
Rosetta’s family, unhappy with this outcome, tries to accept. The contents of the will are, after all, but a reflection of what they had both long feared and half come to expect. Tom is Rosetta’s heir and that is that. With a wry half grin Frank says, ‘Well, he pulled it off. Good luck to him.’
Tom does not care to remain alone. He marries again in the year following.
My grandmother’s existence is noted on Rosetta’s Death Certificate. Next to the space marked ‘Issue in order of birth (living and deceased)’ is written just one word, Frances, and then age unknown. That seems heart-wrenching to me, the not knowing.
Nobody thinks to tell Rosetta’s only child that her wayward, beautiful mother with the curving smile is now truly lost to her forever. There is not a soul who murmurs to her how it was when the woman who gave birth to her drew her last breath and ceased to live.
SIXTY-TWO
Rosetta lived in the same city as her daughter for more than forty years, yet they never met.
For her part, Billie, or Frances as Rosetta would have known her, made no attempt to find her mother. That painful part of her life would not be revisited. Having been rejected when a little child and suffered bitterly, she could not countenance the possibility that she might be wounded once again.
Billie waited, instead. She waited in vain: there was no message, no phone call, nor a letter. It was as if her mother were already in her grave among the spirits of the dead.
My grandmother, my mother, myself: each one of us had been marked by Rosetta’s absence, in different ways and to varying extents.
But, for me, the story hadn’t finished yet.
I see the address on her Last Will and Testament, learn with numbing shock that, until 1958, during the final six years of Rosetta’s life, mother and daughter lived only minutes apart. That my grandmother Billie should have been in such close proximity to her lost mother and yet known nothing of this seems to me to be the final, cruel twist in this extraordinary tale.
I begin to imagine the two of them, unknowingly, passing each other in the street. Perhaps they are at a bus stop, or in the post office, or a shop. Like an inner film rewinding in rapid time, a vast jumble of vivid images rushes through my mind. I wonder if during just such a fleeting encounter there might have been some small thing – a look, a gesture, the way a head is turned or a pair of eyes narrows in the light – that ever leads one of them to experience a brief flutter of unconscious recognition, a faint, unacknowledged rapport.
In the early 1950s Rosetta moved away from Donna Rosa, the home in Murray Street, Bronte, where Tom first brought her silent yellow Packard back to life. Now in her seventies, maintaining the house had become onerous. My great-grandmother was the proprietor of an elegant block of six apartments situated at 34 Salisbury Road, Rose Bay, and so, after one of her tenants decided to vacate, it seemed natural that she and Tom would take his place.
She left behind her beloved Pekingese, Chu-Chu, buried under his lavish headstone alongside Trinket, sold most of her fine furnishings and incinerated many of her more personal possessions. Numerous letters and photographs were burnt. ‘She was a beggar for destroying things,’ Tom said. The fact is, Rosetta was never one to be burdened by the past. Somehow, the child’s suitcase containing the precious evidence of her glamorous life abroad escaped this inferno. She preserved a few of her paintings, a sculpture. And, of course, the tea cups with their fine oriental markings; they were kept.
I have an old black and white photograph of the building, but I go there anyway to see for myself what it is like, this place so close to the modest flat in which Billie lived, the one with the china shepherdesses and the wallpaper with the stains of nicotine.
Though Melton Hall’s open balconies have been enclosed and a flourishing rainforest garden of staghorns and tree ferns has been planted in the front, it is still easy to recognise. Painted a pale buttermilk and shaded by spreading trees, it has retained the original Georgian-style portico with the white tapered columns standing to attention at each side. Rosetta and Tom lived in the top right-hand apartment, so I tilt my head back and, in order to have a better look, squint at it through a crosshatching of branches and leaves. I don’t attempt to enter. It is enough to know it’s there.
Rose Bay is a gorgeous cove, sweeping in a voluptuous arc between the promontories of exclusive Point Piper and Vaucluse. Its cerulean waters are crowded with expensive craft and there is a small island in the middle called Shark, so perfectly positioned it looks as if it were placed there by an especially artful god. The sun is shining in a sky licked by a hot blue glaze and so I decide I will stroll, as Rosetta never did, to the flat where her daughter, my grandmother, lived at Midlothian, 2a Victoria Road, Bellevue Hill. It is not very far; just down the road. Nana is not there now, of course; she died in 1988. The journey would be merely minutes by car, but I wish to know how long it takes to walk and, more importantly, how it feels. I want the sense of the thing.
As I make my way under that bright sky from one flat to the other I become lost in a conjurer’s dream.
It is a day just like this: hard-edged, hot and clear. Only a few insubstantial white wisps interrupt the expanse of cobalt sky. My brother, Michael, is at school. We live in a suburb still so undeveloped that he makes his way there by trudging through the bush. Children do that in the 1950s. They walk everywhere by themselves, even if they’re only five or six.
I am four years old, too young for school, but I recognise the shapes made by 207 and 324. These are the numbers on front of the two green buses Mum and I need to catch so that we can visit my grandmother way over on the other side of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. We live in the verdant north and she, in the cosmopolitan east.
Usually, we alight at the stop opposite her block of flats, but this day will be different. My mother and I stay on a little longer until we reach Rose Bay and a long footpath that curves around the shore. This is where we plan to meet my grandmother, watch the fishermen and feed the sea birds.
It really is very warm; my cotton dress is sticking to my back. We have not gone far when Nana announces she has had enough, she wants to stop and rest beneath a tree. ‘But you go on,’ she says. My mother and I walk further and then pause to watch some pelicans search for aquatic treats. With their enormous, greedy beaks they appear faintly menacing until, suddenly, the birds take flight and as they do acquire a grace and beauty that is transformative.
There is a noise. Not the sound of the birds’ insistent cries nor their beating wings, but something else. It is a woman, a striking old lady with cardinal-red hair. This woman talks in a loud voice, though I don’t know who she can be speaking to as she is sitting on a bench, quite alone. She is not frightening, just very strange.
I leave my mother’s side, run over and ask her the only thing that comes into my mind. ‘Are you lost?’ I say. She stops shouting, studies me with toffee-coloured eyes and says, quite lucidly, ‘I’m no more lost than those birds you see up in the sky.’
She stands and turns, not shouting now but muttering all the while. The way her hair looks as it catches the sun reminds me of fireworks, all blazing sparks and flame. I watch her as she moves past me, then my mother, until finally, in the distance, she passes my grandmother waiting in the shade.
A quick glance at my watch tells me that the walk from Rosetta’s flat to her daughter’s takes just fifteen minutes, but time’s dance is rarely a reliable entity. The journey might have been as brief as the blink of an eye or, then again, as lengthy as eternity.
POSTSCRIPT
Truth is always strange;
Stranger than fiction.
Lord Byron, 1823
Don Juan Canto xiv, Stanza 101
Fact and fiction, truth and fabrication, the incongruous nature of reality and yet the utter believability of that which is untrue – when real events seem impossible and fantasy all too likely, separating the two is challenging.
That historic material and personal reminiscences are rarely in perfect accord adds another layer of complexity. Determining accuracy is particularly difficult when the principal protagonists are, themselves, notoriously unreliable sources. For these reasons, in the writing of Rosetta’s story, allowance has been made for both the vagaries of memory and imagination’s caprice.
With regard to the latter, it occurs to me that at least a little of my great-grandmother’s penchant for invention might have been inherited.
Notwithstanding the above, it should be noted that all the legal records, newspaper reports, journals, my father’s typed accounts, transcribed interviews, the list of patrons, Professor Zeno’s pamphlet and the astonishing letters, postcards and telegrams from which extracts have been drawn exist.
The sole exceptions are the two letters from Lilian. The first letter was, by necessity, invented. Re-creation of the second was required as the original correspondence was destroyed at the insistence of Edwina Mountbatten.
PEOPLE AND EVENTS
The images of Zeno and Rosetta that appear in this book are all drawn from the collection that was discovered in the small child’s suitcase and subsequently despatched from Mermaid Waters by Tom Tait.
The name of Rosetta’s father, my great, great-grandfather, Lewis, appears in the family tree in parentheses, next to his given name of Louis. The former designation has been utilised in order to eliminate confusion with Rosetta’s first husband who, coincidentally, was also named Louis.
The name of Lilian’s son reflects a number of different spellings, depending on the source. Although recorded as Dermott in both Lilian’s death certificate and in Edwina Mountbatten’s letter to Rosetta, his will, together with that inarguable authority, Debrett’s Illustrated Peerage, states that it is Dermot. Accordingly, this is the spelling that has been adopted.
The identity of the priest with whom my great-grandmother shared a long relationship has been disguised.
Although the names of all the ships on which Zeno, Rosetta and Lilian voyaged are correct, it has not been possible to determine the name of the particular ocean liner that carried Rosetta and Zeno to London. As the SS Omrah sailed to and from Australia during this period, in the absence of the relevant maritime records the name of this vessel has been utilised.
A few minor characters are fictitious. These include Ivy, the young woman who provided Rosetta with domestic assistance, Constable Hall, the helpful English bobby, and the showgirl, Mildred.
Alberto Rivero is an amalgam of several of the young Argent
inians who brought tango to London.
All of the other characters in the book, from Empress Eugenie to Princess Charlotte and Baroness Stern, are real: the circumstances of their lives are true, even if, on occasion, this might seem unlikely.
For instance, few people are aware that Helena Rubinstein founded her cosmetics empire in Melbourne. Although in this case there is no proof that she and Rosetta met, given their personalities, plus the fact that the two young women lived in close proximity to each other, during a similar period of time, it is not unlikely that they might have developed a friendship.
Likewise, I have no evidence that William Norman and Banjo Paterson ever shared a drink, though both men did reside in Queen Street, Woollahra, concurrently.
Finally, I do not know if Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was ever introduced to my great-grandparents or not. Nevertheless, as he was a friend of their patron, the great physicist Sir Oliver Lodge, and a passionate fellow spiritualist, it seems well within the realms of possibility.
It might be observed that, rather like Rosetta and Zeno, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Banjo Paterson and Helena Rubinstein were all, albeit each in his or her own way, superb masters of invention. In that regard, their presence in Rosetta’s story seemed to me to be entirely congruent.
The activities described at Wonderland City, from the restaging of Ned Kelly’s siege at Glenrowan to the blazing house-fire tableau and the perilous shipwrecks, really occurred. As Zeno worked as a clairvoyant at Wonderland prior to leaving for London, it can be assumed that, given his and Rosetta’s singular talents, they would have participated in many of these hazardous events.
The description of the 1922 Artists’ Ball is largely a conflation of the incidents that transpired at this and several subsequent revelries.
Rosetta Page 27