Rosetta (13 page)

MELBOURNE, 1910

The clock of time turns back its face. Rosetta's daughter, Frances Catherine, is living with her father in Melbourne. She has neither seen nor heard from her mother for four years. Rosetta's name is never spoken. She might have ceased to exist. Frances has a stepmother now; Louis married again only months after Rosetta left. He was nearly thirty-nine. Minnie Isaacs, his new bride, was aged just nineteen. She could have been his child.

The date is 22 February, Frances' tenth birthday. At the same time as the ship that bears the magnificent magician and her lost mother is carving its way through the sparkling water of Sydney Harbour en route to distant shores, Frances is playing beside the sea at St Kilda. She is a pretty child, if somewhat small for her age, with her father's grey-blue eyes and fine, light-brown hair. On this warm, late summer day, with a wind gusting from the west, she has been taken out by her grandmother for a treat. Her strawberry ice cream is finished, leaving a delicious, sweet
stickiness around her mouth and on her teeth. Now it is time for the beach. With joy, Frances kicks off her soft kid shoes, removes her silk socks and runs barefoot along the sand. The child laughs delightedly as she feels the hot wind whip across her cheeks and through her hair. Then she stops abruptly as seagulls begin to shriek.

When Frances turns to watch the gulls she experiences a strange sensation; the sand seems to shift beneath her feet. She runs from it, escapes into the shallows. Frances feels the swirling water spread across her toes. The wavelets are cold and topped with foam, like the icy milk that is delivered on winter mornings to her home.

Suddenly, the air about her is disturbed by dozens of beating wings. She can feel the changed atmosphere press against her face, the sound throb inside her ears. With this, a vivid image of a woman comes into Frances' mind. The woman has long, dark-red hair and her mouth is curved into a smile that, strangely, makes Frances feel unexpectedly alone.

A moment later the seagulls wheel across the sky, turning in a great arc before flying straight across the water and on towards the sun. As she watches their flight, the image of the woman, so sharp only a moment before, is, like the gulls, just as quickly gone.

 

It is two years later, 1912. While Rosetta learns to tango, for Frances there are other lessons to absorb. Desertion by her mother is followed, after a fashion, by that of her father. This year, Louis turns forty-five. His young wife has babies of her own now, two little boys to bring up. Frances is at a difficult age; no longer a girl, she is not yet a woman. Louis wonders, ‘What am I to do with Rosetta's child?'

The solution is to deposit the twelve-year-old at a convent. Genazzano is a grand boarding school. Founded by the Faithful Companions of Jesus in 1895, it is located on a hill in Kew.
The Annals of Genazzano
describe the property's sweeping view of Melbourne ‘with its domes, majestic pillars and cathedral spires, the many step-like villages, pretty villas half hidden among the trees, clumps of fir trees and eucalyptus, and vast fields traversed by the winding waters of the Yarra Yarra …'.

Our Lady of Good Counsel is Genazzano's patron. I am not certain of the wise counsel my grandmother might have received while in her care.

The school was established by the Companions for the daughters of the country-dwelling Catholic well-to-do. That Frances Catherine Raphael is city-born and of a quite different faith seems not to be a problem. Perhaps it is because she bears the names of two fine saints. Save for occasional holidays at home, Frances spends years within the convent's austere Gothic walls. I try to imagine what it was like for this lonely child, losing all she knew. How did that child feel as she walked through the great arched entrance surmounted by the cross of Christ; did she realise that this would be the place she was to stay? The nuns were stern in those days but even if they had been saints themselves, who could have expected life in a convent to replace a mother, a father, a home?

Genazzano has thoughtfully provided me with a book that describes its history. I find just one mention of my grandmother there: it notes her singular religion. The school's ‘Hymn to Our Lady of Good Counsel' also captures my attention, particularly the third verse. I hope Frances found more solace than she felt sorrow when its words were sung.

THE LAST WORD

_______________________

Botanical and Bacteriological Laboratory.
145, EDGWARE ROAD, W.
Consultation Rooms:
118, NEW BOND STREET, W.

 

Like Rosetta, Zeno had taken Helena Rubinstein's advice to heart and with equal finesse. But whereas his wife changed her attire, Zeno embraced the uniquely successful Rubinstein publicity formula. She had advised Rosetta to ensure that Zeno wrote an article for a respected journal and to make certain it was circulated. And so, just such an article was produced. Distributed in
the form of a pamphlet, it was a
tour de force
of wild claims and invention, filled with references to improbable medical techniques and claims of unparalleled success.

I suspect Zeno then added one more layer of illusion. Rather than have it appear that he was merely boasting about his own achievements, his intention was that the publication itself would appear to be endorsing his prowess. After all, ‘Press Extract from “Scientific News”' is not a very precise description. He might have hoodwinked the journal's editors into thinking that his were reputable claims, or even paid for the article's inclusion in its pages. Perhaps the extract never appeared in
Scientific News
at all. For Zeno, sleight of hand was second nature. His and Rosetta's lives were an inversion of that Ciceronian exhortation
Esse Quam Videri
– To Be Rather Than To Seem To Be. What was important, they knew only too well, was not substance: it was the appearance of a thing.

The fact that Zeno had his own laboratory is interesting. Many of the letters indicate that his custom-made medications were wildly popular: it was not only Lady Archibald Campbell who wrote to Zeno with anxious requests for additional supplies. But what ingredients went into the pills, the powders and the potions he concocted remain a matter about which I can only speculate. Just what were those ‘sensitised, re-vitalising, efficacious herbs'?

Ginseng, wolfberry, red peony, dog spine and ginger, cinnamon and licorice, astragalus root, white wood ear, devil's trumpet and ephedra stem: there must have been rows of wooden shelves in the Edgware Road laboratory lined with these exotic substances, the glass containers in which they lay carefully labelled, their aromas combining to produce a bitter-sweet, pungent fragrance that hung heavy in the air. It would have been easy for Zeno to become familiar with the herbs and their healing properties when he occupied the rooms in Swanston Street, so close to Melbourne's Chinatown. Considering the popularity of his
products, though, I imagine that at least some of these imported ‘efficacious herbs' might now come under the legal heading of ‘Controlled Substances'. They could have included opium from China and quite possibly South American cocaine.

I have no sense of what the building that housed the laboratory looked like, for the original structure is no longer there. Its place has been taken by a modern shop that sells a brand of clothing called High and Mighty, designed to be worn by substantial men. I suppose that the laboratory must have been a busy place, one in which Bunsen burners flared and test tubes bubbled, where assorted elixirs were distilled by an elderly Chinese man who had spent a lifetime studying the herbs' many secrets. No doubt others assisted, men well versed in the dream-like effects or, alternatively, the stimulation afforded by the ingredients employed in the manufacture of more potent remedies.

Whenever the demands of his patients allowed it, the mixing of these ‘medicines', the pressing of tablets and the compounding of powders would have been overseen by the master, Zeno himself. I see him standing, wizard-like, directing this welter of activity, breathing in the heavy, scented air that very likely induced visions of his own. Perhaps a part of him had come to believe he really was a distinguished professor, that his powers were not imaginary but real.

I read the pamphlet, and read it again, several times. It is oddly reminiscent of something else I have seen. What strikes me first is the way in which its claims are so similar to the multitude of cosmetic advertisements that now appear in glossy magazines, many of which adopt scientific terms like ‘pH factor' and ‘cellular renewal', ‘powerful new formula', ‘synchronised recovery' and the ubiquitous ‘clinically proven'.

Such scientific jargon, initiated by Helena Rubinstein, has now become the contemporary language of incantation, replacing more ancient invocations. How quickly Zeno understood the force such words would have, how easily he cast his spell and left fashionable society entranced.

It was only natural that the newly minted Japanese Professor should insert all those references to radium into his text, for, in an age of boiling scientific revelation, its discovery was arguably the most exciting. Ever since 1903, when Marie Curie first identified this startling element, a new industry based entirely on radio-active quackery had emerged. After Madame Curie won the Nobel Prize in 1911, it gathered additional momentum.

Zeno was not slow to seize upon radium's ‘wonders' and potential – for his own commercial gain, if not for medical accomplishment. The wording of the pamphlet shows that he was well aware of the allure of this new substance. The opportunity for him to tout it as a magic panacea for almost any ailment was a godsend.

Of course, if Zeno did actually utilise radium there is no doubt it would have caused a great deal more harm than good. Radiation poisoning was to prove lethal, though, to be fair, at that stage no one was aware of its effects. Even Marie Curie herself, who died from complications caused by her exposure to the deadly substance (she was said to have carried about glowing fragments in her pocket), knew very little of its dangers. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, its use must have seemed to Zeno a splendid way in which to convince his clients that he had a profound mastery of science.

Something else about the pamphlet occurs to me, which is how very like William Anderson's advertisements for Wonderland its language is. The phrasing has the same rolling cadences of the ringmaster; the claims reflect an equivalent delight in the use of superlatives. As I read the words I can almost hear Anderson's persuasive voice proclaiming, ‘Roll up, roll up for the Greatest Show on Earth,' the single difference being that the show in this instance was taking place in Professor Carl Zeno's New Bond Street suite rather than in the Palace of Illusions, in an amusement park by the sea.

 

The pamphlet worked magnificently. Consider the patronage of Zeno by none other than Sir Oliver Lodge, knighted by King Edward for his exceptional contribution to science, recipient of the prestigious Rumford Medal from the Royal Society for ‘an outstandingly important scientific discovery', and first Principal of the University of Birmingham. Sir Oliver developed the key patents that led to the Nobel Prize-winning Marconi's invention of that miracle of the age, the wireless. Consider also Marconi's wife, the former Honourable Beatrice O'Brien, daughter of the 14th Baron of Inchiquin, who was, like Sir Oliver, another of Professor Zeno's loyal patrons.

Lodge and Marconi were men of the highest scientific probity. They devoted their professional lives to the study of electromagnetic waves. Yet, despite the fact that one was a brilliant physicist and the other an equally gifted electrical engineer, Zeno's outrageous claim that ‘
electrical and other experiments
' had resulted in he alone becoming the possessor of ‘the last word in the eradication and final conquest of all ailments and diseases' was apparently accepted at face value. I suppose it does prove Zeno's thesis: the more immense and fabulous the lie, the more likely it is to be believed.

Sir Oliver, it seems, was completely taken in. Standing as he did at the very pinnacle of Britain's scientific community, this seems extraordinary to me. That is, until I discover that Sir Oliver, despite all his scientific prowess and academic eminence, was an ardent believer in the existence of another world inhabited by spirits.

At first I was bewildered by such naïvety. How could this imminent man of science – and he was but one of many – succumb to such absurd flights of fancy? Yet, upon reflection, I began to see not just the sense but also the logic behind Sir Oliver's conviction.

In this exciting age of scientific innovation it sometimes seemed that breakthroughs were made on a near daily basis. X-rays and cathode rays and electromagnetism, light waves and
sound waves and the power of radiation: a veritable tidal wave of discoveries swept away what had for centuries been thought immutable and unchanging. As early as 1884, Sir Oliver Lodge wrote, ‘Things hitherto held impossible do actually occur.' They did, and proof abounded.

This phenomena was, perhaps, expressed most evocatively in 1913 by the writer Edith Nesbit, who posed what must have seemed a reasonable question: ‘If electricity can move through the air unseen, why not carpets?'

Why not indeed? Embedded in this wondrous supposition was a thrilling
plausibility.

Possessed by a desire to communicate with those who lived beyond the grave, Sir Oliver, the former president of the Physical Society, became president of the Psychical Society, instead. This exchange, heralding so much more than merely the rearrangement of a few letters, led him into the realm of seers, mediums and clairvoyants.

It was inevitable that the esteemed Professor Zeno, erstwhile of the Ku-Mari Hospital and Medical Schools, Japan, would come to his attention. For, though Zeno may have appeared to embrace the latest scientific advances, he was, in fact, never to relinquish his former professional practices. Seeing the future, sensing emanations, foretelling death, joyous events and terrible disasters; these arcane skills remained his stock in trade. Rather than dispensing with his tricks, the magician merely utilised the semblance of current, scientific breakthroughs in order to remain fashionably pertinent or, as Helena Rubinstein would have said,
au courant
.