Madeleine

by Helen Trinca

  Madeleine’s affair with Dave was an affirmation of her sexual appeal and her ability to have a man of her own. Her divorce had left her feeling desolate and abandoned, and she had wasted emotion in her infatuation with Michael Chesterman, but now she found a measure of security with Dave, at least for a time.

  The affair had been an on-again, off-again relationship, but Dave was shocked when it ended. One minute they were getting along famously, the next they were standing on the stairs at 75 Swinbrook Road deep in an argument that had come out of nowhere. Dave recalled, ‘We had a big bust-up and I left. That was it.’18 Madeleine may well have brought the argument on—as she so often did when intimacy became too much for her—but she was desperately unhappy at the end of the relationship, telling friends that Dave had left her and that she was still in love with him.19 Years later, she opened her third novel, The Essence of the Thing, with a rejection that comes out of the blue, as sudden as the rupture between herself and Dave.

  Madeleine had long wanted a child, but when she became pregnant she had an abortion. She and Dave had just broken up and perhaps she couldn’t face a child alone. Dave didn’t know she was pregnant—he would find out from others some years later.20 Madeleine told Colette that Swami-ji told her to have the abortion. She was not upset when she told her sister the story, but Madeleine wrote a poignant letter to Vidya Jones noting that Dave’s sister-in-law ‘had a baby boy at 4 a.m. on Thursday, Virgo/Libra cusp, very, very beautiful—you may imagine one’s feelings’.21 And on several occasions later in her life, she expressed regret about ‘the child she should have had’.22

  During her time in Swinbrook Road, Madeleine met Judith McCue, an Australian studying at the London School of Economics. They were introduced by Francis James, a mutual friend who had been a defendant in the Oz obscenity trial in 1964. He was charged with printing the offending edition and was defended by Ted at the trial. The eccentric James hit the headlines again when he was jailed by the Chinese in 1969 as an alleged spy.23 When he was released in 1973, he spent extended periods in London, staying mainly at his club and treating Judith and Madeleine to meals there. But when his money ran out, he landed on his friends, including Madeleine. His war injuries and his time in jail had ruined his health and it is likely Madeleine nursed the maverick, who was old enough to be her father. Not that she seemed to mind. They were both complex personalities who loved to spar and were a match for each other.24 Madeleine and Judith soon formed a strong friendship, which endured after Judith married and moved with her astronomer husband, Edward Kibblewhite, to the US.

  As she made new connections in the seventies, Madeleine lost touch with some of her old friends. She saw the Chestermans, who were back home after a year in Africa. But they were now living near the University of Warwick, where Michael was teaching, and contact was limited. At the same time, Australia was being transformed by the Whitlam Labor government, and many expats were heading home. Bruce Beresford returned to Australia in 1970 and was busy defining the national character in films such as The Adventures of Barry McKenzie and the classics Don’s Party and Breaker Morant.

  Australia was changing and Madeleine was curious. In 1976 she made her first trip home after a decade away. It is likely that Ted paid her airfare. The teenage St John boys scarcely knew their half-sister. When Madeleine arrived at Vino del Mar, taking up residence in the maid’s quarters, it was as if they were meeting her for the first time. Ed, now sixteen, had just started writing record reviews for Rolling Stone, which was, coincidentally, co-owned and co-edited by Octopus member Jane Iliff. To Ed, Madeleine was exotic: she nonchalantly smoked dope in the kitchen and introduced him to the American rock band Little Feat, who became one of his favourites.

  Madeleine rose late, drank endless cups of tea, then, draped in scarves, whiled away the afternoon inside the house, rarely venturing out till late. She maintained a glacial pace and an indifference to work. And Patrick St John, at thirteen, noted how much Madeleine upset his mother.25

  Colette had returned to Sydney in 1970 and travelled around Australia. She spent a year at the radical arts space, the Yellow House, near Kings Cross. But at the end of 1974 she suffered a severe nervous breakdown and was admitted to the North Ryde psychiatric hospital. She recalled:

  Suicide was always with me, it was my escape route, it was my comfort, it was my God, it was my religion. I was saving my money to go to India, everyone had been to the east. I said to myself, if things don’t work out for me, there are opiates [there] and I could just die. My fantasy was to go overland to the Himalayas and just die.

  She too was trying to sort out her relationship with Ted, repeatedly trying to win his approval: ‘After we both left home I ran after that man, whenever I had the guts to come back and reconnect myself with the St John family.’26

  Ted was back at the bar after his stints in politics and business. He had not grown rich from his mining and property interests but had done quite well.27 Madeleine enjoyed an extended stay in Sydney, courtesy of Ted and Val. She visited the family’s weekender in the high country at Mt Elliot just inland from Avoca Beach. Ted and Val had bought the old corrugated iron and timber farmhouse on a few acres in 1967. Ted loved the bush and it was a haven, especially for Oliver, who could roam freely and safely over the property. By the time Madeleine saw it in the seventies, Mt Elliot had become the centre of family gatherings for the extended St John clan.

  In Sydney, Madeleine telephoned Chris and reminded him he still owed her money from the divorce settlement. ‘Send me an invoice,’ he told her. ‘I don’t do bills,’ she retorted.28 The wounds of their marriage were still raw.

  Madeleine was not tempted to remain in Australia. She and Chris had left Sydney as bright young things, but their dreams had collapsed in Boston, and Madeleine scaled back her expectations. In London she had created a space of her own. Her life, no matter how reduced, was in London, not Sydney. She thought of Australia as ‘an accident of birth rather than as her homeland’. She had been ‘brought up on the idea that England was where I came from, in a deep sense where I belonged. Australia was a deviation of one’s essence.’29

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Madame Blavatsky

  The decade or so that Madeleine spent at Number 75 Swinbrook Road was dominated by efforts to research and write a biography of Helena Blavatsky. The project dragged on and on, becoming a metaphor for Madeleine’s own lack of direction. It was Madeleine’s excuse for not pursuing an orthodox career. Ted held the Blavatsky biography up to his sons as an example of Madeleine’s inability to complete projects, and he warned them against following in her footsteps.

  No one is sure why Madeleine chose to write about the extraordinary Russian woman who moved from dabbling in the occult, holding séances in Cairo, to founding the Theosophical Society in 1875. One reason may have been that the fusion of the east and west inherent in theosophy matched Madeleine’s interest in both eastern religion and Christianity. But perhaps Madeleine was simply intrigued by this controversial woman, who had a complicated childhood. The facts of Blavatsky’s early life are scant but it is known she was only eleven when her mother died. Madeleine may have been drawn to explore a life she saw as parallel to her own.

  Quite how long Madeleine worked on Blavatsky is unclear, but she talked about it to Miriam Herbert as early as 1972, told people in 1980 that it was finished, rewrote it and announced it finally finished in 1987, and was still trying to get it published in the early 1990s. The project defined her middle-age. The material was complicated but Madeleine embraced the act of writing. It was through Blavatsky that she became convinced that it was her role in life to be a writer. She began to see writing almost as a calling, reporting to Vidya Jones in Australia:

  I must tell you that there is nothing I know more destructive of the dreaded ego [than writing]. I really believe that to be fully engaged on a creative endeavour is a righteous spiritual path…1

  Madeleine supported herself in this period with a succession
of small jobs, as well as rent from subletting rooms at Number 75. She also signed up for unemployment benefits. There was money from the divorce settlement, although she had to wait for some time for the funds to come through. It is not clear how much money, if any, Ted sent to her in these years, but in 1980 he paid for her to travel to Australia again. He had taken a number of high-profile, but not lucrative, legal cases, but thanks to his earlier success in business, he and Val were more comfortably off than they had been earlier in their marriage. Val was not in paid work, but she spent a lot of time involved in fundraising and supporting Inala, a Rudolf Steiner–based institution for the disabled in Sydney’s northern suburbs, where Oliver lived.

  Madeleine’s leisurely lifestyle and failure to get a ‘real job’ in London worried her father and stepmother, but their frustration increased when Madeleine visited Sydney and they saw her operating at close quarters. She was brittle and ready to take offence. Feiga, who had moved to Adelaide to live with Josette and her family, was terminally ill with lung cancer, and no one, it seems, had told Madeleine. When she found out, she was incensed, convinced her family was treating her with disrespect.2 Madeleine visited Feiga just before she died on 26 April. Back in Sydney, she wrote to Judith McCue to say she was ‘having a perfectly awful time’. She said of her grandmother’s death:

  I would like it to be known (!)—the family is ignoring this fact studiously—that I am very disturbed & freaked out, one way & another & can handle nothing, let alone all the junk I seem to be attracting. This evening am working on trying to see the ludicrous side—as a means of surviving—&, so far, failing…We’ll have to trust in a benevolent Deity—what else do we have?3

  Madeleine was undoubtedly grieving for Feiga, but she was self-absorbed and could interpret the event and the reactions of her family only as an assault on her well being.

  Val and Ted had planned a family holiday with Ed and Patrick to a beach resort in Fiji. It was to be a celebration of the end of Ted’s work on the high-profile Barton case, in which he successfully defended the business magnate Alexander Barton and his son Thomas on corporate charges. But Ted was again busy in the Supreme Court, pursuing action against the Chelmsford Private Hospital in Sydney over the notorious deep-sleep therapy used on depressed patients in the 1970s. Ted had taken the case pro bono. The hearings continued for months, and Ted could not go to Fiji with the family. Val invited Madeleine in his place.

  At the resort, Ed and Patrick enjoyed themselves windsurfing and drinking beers. They rather liked their half-sister, but the holiday was a strain for Val. Madeleine stayed in bed till noon then emerged swathed in layers of clothing to protect her fair skin and retreated to read a book under a palm tree. There was so much history between the two women that every conversation was a minefield. One day, seeing a family on the beach with an adopted Vietnamese child, Val remarked that she and Ted had thought of adopting but had decided they could not give a child enough access to his or her own culture. Madeleine was angry. ‘Fuck you, you bitch,’ she thought. ‘How can you say that to me, who you prevented from doing French honours, who you never encouraged to have anything to do with French language, or people, or anything.’4 Madeleine always considered her mother to be French. Indeed, she believed at this stage that her grandfather, Jean Meer Cargher, was French—she discovered only towards the end of her life that both Jean and Feiga were born in Romania.

  On her 1980 trip to Australia, Madeleine also spent time with Vidya Jones and her sister Christine Hill. Christine was married to another ashram follower, Ralph Magid, an exuberant member of a well-known Melbourne Jewish family. The couple had returned to Australia and opened a bookshop in the outer Melbourne suburb of Mulgrave. At Mulgravia, as the group called it, Ralph and Christine were optimistic about their business and Vidya, separated from her husband Phil and with two little boys to rear, had moved to Melbourne to help them run the shop. The three of them welcomed Madeleine and the visit went well. Madeleine felt she was with her real family. She excelled herself with her ‘party pieces’ about far-from-glamorous Mulgrave, performing skits on ‘the topography & Climate of Mulgravia’ and ‘the True Inwardness of a Modern Australian Shopping Complex’. In Mulgrave she felt she had space to ‘talk’. Later, back in England, she wrote to Vidya about how much she missed:

  all the fun of being with youse & always will…Vidya my sweet it really is very very heartwarming to me to have your love & friendship & your dear relations as, let’s face it, I really have no other ‘family’. So I hope you lot never cast me out not that you would…5

  The fear of being abandoned was never far from Madeleine’s mind.

  Madeleine met up with her old university and London friend Winton Higgins in Sydney—but only after they met by accident on a bus. They had lost touch in the seventies. Winton recalled that Madeleine seemed to be happy with the direction of her life.6 The lives of those who had met through SUDS and Honi Soit had changed considerably in the last two decades. Many of the Octopus women were divorced or separated from their first partners; some had found their hopes of careers interrupted by children at a time when child care was hard to find; some had put aside their dreams. Suicide had touched them. One of the group, Helen Goldstein, haunted by depression, had died in her twenties after several suicide attempts. Tragedy struck another of their contemporaries when Diane Horler, sister of the theatre director Ken Horler, died after an illegal abortion.7

  In June 1980, Chris’s mother died. Madeleine had continued to write to Joan long after her divorce from Chris and it is likely they remained in touch until she died. It was another break with the past: Joan had been Madeleine’s only link with Chris and her only source of any news about his life in Australia with Martha. Over time, Madeleine would create a new narrative about her American years. Her London friends would be told only that she had been married for a brief time. Few people knew the name of her former husband, or any other details. Madeleine held tight to her belief that Chris had had an affair, but he faded from her story.

  Not so Sylvette. In Australia, Madeleine salvaged several photographs of her mother from the boxes of pictures that Ted had kept. She was convinced her father wanted to cut Sylvette from the family record. She believed Ted had enforced a silence after her mother’s death and that taking possession of the photographs was a way to reclaim that past. In the end it was Madeleine who excised her mother from the family collection, but she felt she had ‘rescued’ Sylvette.8

  Back in London in the middle of 1980, Madeleine was flush with funds after receiving part of the divorce settlement. Madeleine knew Chris needed the money and some of her friends chided her for taking it, but she was unperturbed. She considered it rightfully hers. She used the money to go to court and get rid of a difficult tenant, and then splurged on several pairs of expensive Charles Jourdan designer shoes.9 In November she wrote to Vidya: ‘I am not doing anything very responsible let alone difficult, until the money’s gone. I’m just doing a bit of this, a bit of that & it is, of course, rather nice.’10

  Her bond with Vidya was strong. When Vidya went through a difficult period, Madeleine wrote to say she felt:

  powerless to offer any practical assistance…At this distance there are only words: & who needs those, especially mine. So I am just thinking of you sorrowfully in a void. So I beg you to write even a few words just as soon as ever you can & tell me how you are, exactly. The veil of myah (the darkness of the universe) gets thicker by the minute, one seeks ever the enormous joke at the bottom of the pile. So to speak. ‘Some laugh, some weep some dance for joy.’11

  The letter was tender and honest. Madeleine understood now, at some deep level, that human existence was fundamentally absurd. Her emotional security, imperfect as it was, was linked to Number 75, where she was in control. Back in London after a few years away, Miriam was relieved to find Madeleine had a room for rent. Both women were still attending the ashram kirtans and Miriam, who had retrained as a nurse and was working at the Royal Masonic Hospi
tal, was happy to give Madeleine another chance. Miriam paid twelve pounds a week for a room at the front of the house; Madeleine had the beautiful large space on the mezzanine with deep windows, over which she had grown a geranium creeper; and another lodger, John Simmonds, a British cameraman, lived on the top floor.

  Miriam described the house as set up ‘like a museum’ with Madeleine’s second-hand goods given pride of place. Madeleine had an old Elizabeth David cookbook and French cookware bought at the markets and she imbued the objects with a value only she could see. Her cat, Darling Point, named after the Sydney suburb, ate everything from boiled eggs to bread and butter.12 Madeleine doted on her cat. She wrote to Vidya: ‘The puss is, as ever, the ever-sweet Darling precious.’13

  Initially, Miriam was happy at Number 75. ‘Madeleine has been ever so sweet to me and in 2 weeks I’ll have a good (bigger) room here. I really feel at home back here in Swinbrook Road,’ she wrote to her brother, Tim.14 But Madeleine proved to be tricky. She had always been quick to judge and before long Miriam found her overly critical and set in her ways and her ideas. She was still using a lot of dope, despite Swami-ji’s entreaties to his followers to stay away from drugs, and now had a smoker’s cough.

  In December that year, nineteen-year-old Tim, backpacking his way around Europe, came to stay with his older sister at Swinbrook Road for a short time. It was the first time he had met Madeleine. She was welcoming, but Tim quickly realised that he must not cross her. He remembered her as a control freak, crusty and ‘snooty’ at times. She was ‘vivid, brittle, contrary, but never an ingénue’. Tim thought she was very observant, that she was always mentally taking notes. Madeleine invited Tim to her room and instructed him in the virtues of Schubert chamber music and its superiority to his symphonies. On New Year’s Day, Tim and Miriam went to a kirtan at Islington. Tim recalled that everyone had waited for Swami-ji to arrive ‘like the Messiah’. Madeleine did not attend, but when Miriam and Tim returned she asked: ‘So, what was the message of the day?’ Though still connected to the ashram, she had perhaps grown a little cynical.