Rosetta (22 page)

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 shocking.

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.

‘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.'

‘Yer bloody won't!' she cries. ‘I'll sort it out meself.'

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.

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.

I see all this in a small watercolour, twenty-three centimetres long by eighteen centimetres high, executed on a piece of card. It is not an outstanding work, not by any means, but there is something about the woman's form, its whiteness against the dark, the absorbed expression on her face, the way her near-naked body is displayed and, above all, those insistent crimson slippers that makes it hard to look away.

It is Rosetta. Carl must have painted her. There is no title on the back of the painting, no signature on the front, but I recognise my great-grandmother's intense look. And the legs; I have seen those legs before.

There are several photographs of Rosetta which, similar to the painting, date from the 1920s. They show her striking insouciant poses, filled with confidence, aware of how well she looks in her smart clothes. Rosetta gazes out from underneath a cloche hat, worn fashionably low on her brow. She is wearing a fur-edged coat that ends just at the knee so I can easily take note of her limbs, which in this instance are encased by sheer black stockings and flattered by the addition of ankle-strapped high heels. She tips one foot back and bends her knee, then crosses the front leg over in order to display both legs advantageously, looks pleased. There are four of these photographs. Rosetta lounges by an immense motor car, its bonnet adorned by a small silver nymph, wings poised for flight. I can see that my great-grandmother is attended
by a uniformed chauffeur in a peaked hat and long, polished boots. From the crenellated, neo-Gothic building behind her and the tree-filled gardens, it appears she is at Government House in Sydney, though I don't know what has brought her to this Vice-Regal residence.

I return to the little painting, look at the brushwork, hold it to the light. There is something not quite right. I think it has been painted over a photograph; in fact I can now see that the figure remains a photograph, though the face is tinted and those incongruous, deliciously red slippers have certainly benefited from a slick of paint. Carl always enjoyed illusion: I suppose it is only natural that his art would combine the real with the fanciful, aim to trick the eye.