Madeleine
Page 16
When Tim decided to leave freezing London and chase the sun to Greece, Madeleine asked him to bring back some duty-free Bisquit cognac. She may have been down-at-heel, but she knew quality. Tim recalled that ‘she was giving me a life lesson, she seemed like a woman of the world’.15
When he came back a few months later, Madeleine was a little less welcoming, although she sometimes included him when friends came round for long talking and smoking sessions in her room. As the dope kicked in, Madeleine relaxed. ‘She was quite brassy, quite open about sex and sexuality,’ Tim recalled.16
One day, a thin, long-haired man who lived close by drove Madeleine and Tim out of London to see horse chestnut trees in bloom. Madeleine insisted they were her favourite English tree and said Tim simply must see them. She produced a spliff and they started smoking. It was quite a trip, Madeleine, with her ‘pinched, nervous’ face, looking back from the front seat and gently mocking the young Australian as they rocketed, stoned, through the English countryside.17
By mid-1981, Miriam was again fed up with Madeleine. Tim had dropped in for a few days after travelling in Egypt and the visit had not gone over well with Madeleine. Miriam wrote to her parents in Sydney that she was looking for somewhere else to live:
Being near Madeleine has become too heavy. She is always finding fault and accused both Tim and me of being ungrateful, taking things for granted etc. I don’t know what she expects—flowers from Harrods or should we kiss her feet. She has a neurosis, where she needs to find fault continually. She has been lucky to have me around who minds my own business, is tidy, unobtrusive + coughs up the rent punctually. She always wants to play the landlady—she can’t have things on an equal basis. As far as I can see the best thing for me is to find somewhere else where I can feel part of the household and have some friendly, open-minded people about, not one who is locked in her own head and can’t (won’t) get out.18
In August, Miriam left the household.
Unemployment in the UK was high, and Madeleine struggled to find even a part-time job. In many ways, she seemed to her friends to be living the life of a student. When Peter Grose and his wife, Roslyn Owen, bumped into Madeleine in the street near the Portobello markets one day, she invited them around for a meal. Peter, who had been part of the Honi Soit set, was now a literary agent, and Roslyn, who knew Madeleine from their school days at Queenwood, worked on a newspaper in Fleet Street. They were delighted to see Madeleine after almost twenty years, but were surprised when they were expected to sit on the floor at Swinbrook Road, eat spaghetti bolognaise and listen to a heavy metal band.19
When Ed St John visited his half-sister, he found Number 75 unprepossessing rather than charming. In Australia, brazenly smoking dope at Vino del Mar, Madeleine had seemed sophisticated. In a sparsely furnished house off the Portobello Road, the image was a little harder to sustain.20
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Colville Gardens
Madeleine was delighted when Number 75 Swinbrook Road was demolished in the early 1980s and she was rehoused in a larger block of mansion flats at 55 Colville Gardens, Notting Hill. Colville Gardens was several steps up from Swinbrook Road, and her new home had a beautiful outlook across an open square to the spare and elegant All Saints Church. From her spacious flat on the fourth and fifth floors, Madeleine looked through trees to the belltower. The light was lovely, the air seemed fresh, and she had a home all her own, free of other tenants, in the heart of one of the world’s great cities.
Her mansion block had been built in the mid-1800s as part of a large development centred on All Saints. The construction was funded by a wealthy vicar with a social conscience, but he ran out of money before the project was completed and the church was derelict for years. It became known as All Sinners in the Mud, because it had a disreputable congregation and was surrounded by half-built houses on farmland. The church was eventually completed in 1861, and property speculators continued to build houses in the area. Notting Hill was a new London address for upwardly mobile Victorians. But over the years, it became less appealing. The houses were too grand for city workers, but too small for the rich folk who preferred the more fashionable Kensington.1 Between the first and second world wars, the area became more decrepit and it was not until the 1960s and 1970s that the Notting Hill Housing Trust began to improve conditions. In 1999, Madeleine wrote about those earlier decades when Notting Hill was home to:
long-exploited Afro-Caribbean immigrants and their British-born offspring, and west Londoners who’d been through the war and the bombs and the rationing. They had never quite managed to find the cash to flee, like all their better-off neighbours, from the sad and seedy old post-war Hill, where the hundred-year leases were falling in and everything else was falling down, gradually, around their ears… [it] was the place the hippies colonised. One could still find a cheap room or a tenement flat—two rooms with a shared bathroom: and a key to the communal gardens (sure, you can use my key—peace and love!). The communal gardens were full of hippies smoking weed and playing guitars.2
When Madeleine arrived, in the early 1980s, Notting Hill was still edgy. Prostitutes used the porch at All Saints as their pick-up point, while their pimps took over the nearby phone box as an office.3 Madeleine loved the surrounding streets with their nineteenth-century ‘wedding-cake architecture’ and the ‘columns, balustrades, Roman arches and balconies with cast-iron trimmings’, along with communal gardens, and the trees.4 She relished the bohemian feel. With her roll-your-own cigarettes and her wild hair she merged happily into the scene. And she was even closer to her favourite market stalls on Portobello Road. At Colville Gardens she nested once again. She installed some of her beloved possessions from Swinbrook Road, including a huge yellow and blue canvas painted by Dave Codling.5 She rescued cast-off objects from the street stalls and dumps, including the metal frame of a chaise longue which she hauled up the stairs, positioning it to create a unique sculpture. In her attic she hung net curtains around the bed and had a trompe l’oeil painted on the wall. The drawing room had pale grey walls and painted floorboards, with much of the area covered in seagrass matting. The curtains on the tall windows were antique linen, with thin blue braid sewn on a few inches in from the edges.6 And she had Darling Point, her beloved cat, for company.
Madeleine was still trying to get a job, but had little success. She was thinner than ever, living on vegetables and cheese from the Portobello Road stalls, and she was smoking heavily. But she found Colville Gardens blissful. Up among the trees it was decidedly heavenly, with the rhythm of each leisurely day marked by the All Saints bells. Madeleine had begun attending Church of England services before the move to Notting Hill, but now, with a church so close that she could almost touch it from her kitchen window, she became a regular attendant.
Madeleine was a cultural Anglican: the vicarage was in her blood. But, increasingly, the church became embedded in Madeleine’s life. She loved the music. She had not played the piano for many years, but she had a deep interest in music of all sorts, from traditional hymns to jazz. All Saints was a High-Church parish and some elements of its practice—such as the use of the Catholic mass books rather than the Book of Common Prayer—irritated her. But it was a beautiful building and she was prepared to overlook the ‘bells and smells’ copied from Rome.
Her years at St Catherine’s had given her ‘a very solid grounding in the C of E texts’. But Madeleine had rejected religion as a teenager. Now she was drawn to the idea of transcendence through religion as well as all its rituals. In 2004, she said:
I am the sort of person who needs to be in a nice church or I don’t want to be in any church. If it is some dreary little evangelical church with bad music and a dreary little vicar with an Australian accent, then I don’t want to be there. If the service is not a nicely conducted one with the right stuff, the right atmosphere, I don’t want to go.7
All Saints passed the test. It was a fine building with broad, well-proportioned aisles. It had been badly b
ombed during World War II, but when it reopened in 1951 it had new shrines, painted gold-leaf altarpieces and all the trappings of a High-Church place of worship. For Madeleine, the Church of England was also appealing because it was so much a part of the English landscape. As the official established church, it was woven into public life in a way she had never experienced in Australia. She loved walking across the square on Sunday mornings and chatting in the church porch after the service.
Religion was important to Madeleine. One of the relationships she consistently explored in her novels was between her characters and God. She was interested in living a moral life in a secular age. In A Pure Clear Light, published in 1996, one of her characters stands in the kitchen praying to the Blessed Virgin Mary and drags her family off to Communion on Christmas Eve. Faith is applauded, not denigrated, in her novels.
But Madeleine had eclectic tastes. In the early years at Notting Hill she still attended kirtans. Swami-ji did not ask his followers to reject Christianity, and Madeleine continued to look to both the church and the ashram for enlightenment. Friends who had scoffed at her attachment to an Indian guru were similarly surprised by her Anglican faith. Neither belief system seemed to gel with the acerbic Madeleine they had known in the 1960s.8 Nor with the woman immersed in a project on Madame Blavatsky.
Madeleine was struggling with the biography after a decade of work, but it was clear to Felicity Baker that she was a gifted writer. She recalled that the manuscript was a critical look at Blavatsky. She felt her cousin was past her ‘ashram phase’ and was sceptical of theosophy and deeply committed to Anglican theology. But she did not think the biography was coherent. Little was known of Blavatsky’s childhood, and Madeleine had opted to write a ‘creative’ version of her early years. She had written a ‘tremendously sensitive picture of what it was like to emerge as a little girl in such a world, at such a time’. But merging that story with factual narrative was difficult, and Madeleine had not managed to tie the threads of the book together.9
Madeleine made friends with a small group of people in the All Saints congregation, among them, a young artist named Celia Irvine. The two women met at a religious retreat, which comprised a series of weekly meetings.10 Madeleine and Celia were close to two other people at that point: David Bambridge, a primary school teacher, and Frances Barrett, who had attended All Saints since she was a small child. Frances organised the coffee after the Sunday services and sang in the choir. Celia, a talented artist, decorated the paschal candle and organised a carpet of flowers in the church on Corpus Christi Sunday.
Madeleine hovered at the edges. She loved the cut and thrust of debate outside the church after the Sunday service and was at times involved in the choir, but when Frances asked her to visit a sick parishioner, Madeleine said, ‘I go to church in order to worship God, not to do social work.’11
More interesting to Madeleine were the arguments with the vicar, Father John Brownsell. Madeleine, David and Celia were a little gang of dissenters. They saw themselves as the ‘naughty background kids’ who challenged the vicar’s decisions.12 He had created an atmosphere that was so High-Church, Frances recalled, that ‘Catholics didn’t even know they were not in a Catholic church’.13
The Church of England was the ‘FUN church’, Madeleine told Judith McCue.14 But she was serious about religion. She believed ‘that we are all equally sinners and that we are all equally redeemed by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and we have to work out our salvation on the ground day to day’.15 She said that her belief in God was her only way of managing a life that she often felt was ‘a chaos of failure and futility’.16
As always, Madeleine kept aspects of her life and her friendship circles separate, although she once took Celia along to a kirtan held in a big house in Kilburn. There were about forty people, and copious amounts of tea were served. Everyone took off their shoes and danced. She was grateful to God, she told Deidre Rubenstein, who had spent five years at the ashram before returning to her life as an actor in Melbourne:
God has been wonderfully good & I am wonderfully nervous—wondering what game I am meant to be playing—for it can’t really be this nice, so enjoyable—when is that monster going to leap out from the wings?17
Celia and the rest of the little gang sometimes gathered at Madeleine’s flat, where their hostess appeared to live on air. Invited for a meal once, the friends were presented with half a lettuce leaf each with tomatoes and sour cream.18 And although the flat was simply furnished, Madeleine was houseproud. She changed the curtains from summer to winter, and the flat was almost always filled with music from the BBC. The Blavatsky research was in evidence, with books out on the dining table. One day Madeleine talked Frances into helping her proof the manuscript and they spent hours sitting on the floor, wading through the punctuation.19
Madeleine was an engaging but complicated friend. Frances wondered at times whether this expatriate Australian was striking a calculated pose for effect. One day she telephoned Madeleine before lunch, only to get a blast: ‘Christ, Frances, I don’t know how to tell you, but one does not usually ring before 10 o’clock!’ One Christmas morning after church, Frances popped over to Colville Gardens but could not stay long. Madeleine was livid. She had organised nothing but had assumed a few of the gang would be around to celebrate—she worked on a very loose timetable and was often oblivious to the pressures on people with regular jobs and families. Frances was appalled, and she took a step back from her demanding friend.
Frances had often lent Madeleine money to tide her over a financial crisis. Madeleine was scrupulous about repaying the money quickly, always with a small gift and loving notes. Once she wrote:
Dear Frances, £100 with my most grateful thanks. You must have pulled me out of more financial black holes than you’ve had hot dinners, at least lately—so here’s a cold pudding to make up the difference. Hope it’s OK! As I’ve never made it before & as you see it has not been tasted. Lots of Love, Madeleine.20
Other friends bailed her out too. Judith McCue sent money from Chicago. In February 1989, Madeleine wrote to Judith to say that her cheque to Judith had not been cashed and so she therefore proposed to repay her by buying ‘frocks’ for her young daughter, Jessica.21 But survival in these years was often cobbled together. Madeleine’s flat was distinctive, thanks to her talent at putting the pieces together, but it was freezing, and her friends wondered what she lived on.22
Frances saw how vulnerable Madeleine was. When Darling Point died, Madeleine told Frances that life without her cat was ‘quite incredibly lonely’.23 But soon Madeleine had another cat, a prized Turkish Vann called Puck, brilliantly white with different-coloured eyes—one blue, one brown. The All Saint’s curate, Father David Clues, conducted a blessing ceremony, and Frances stood as godmother.24
Madeleine had always been quick to judge and lecture her friends, but this character trait was becoming even more pronounced. When Vidya Jones and her two young sons returned to London in 1985, the friends saw each other rarely and Vidya found Madeleine difficult:
She was very sweet, she had a very sweet blithe quality, charming and je ne sais quoi; she really was one of those people who had an extra little thing. But she had another side to her, the side that was quite sharp and bitter. She couldn’t help herself. It was not that you went on or off, she went on or off. You wouldn’t know why. You could be having a lovely day with her and then she would get sick of you. She didn’t have the capacity to keep something going. There’s always a lull in friendship but you sustain it because you like the person. She would just destroy everything, destroy a relationship.25
Vidya had known Madeleine well for many years and loved her, and she understood her shortcomings. Madeleine was outgoing and sociable but often attacked those closest to her. The most common complaint about Madeleine, voiced by many of her friends over the decades, was that when there was a rupture, it was inexplicable. They would rack their brains but could never identify what they had done to cause
offence.
Madeleine often looked for ways to control her friends. She wanted them to be better, and to fit them into the picture she had created of them and of her life. She set about remodelling David Bambridge. He recalled that Madeleine was ‘quite cutting and prickly…rather grand at times, but also kind, generous and funny’. She was forever trying to improve him, once presenting him with a tweed jacket she had bought in a charity shop, with the implied message that it was suitable attire for a true English gentleman. On another occasion, it was an old copy of Fowler’s Modern English Usage. Some of her gifts had a fustier value, like the GPO Bakelite telephone she found on a skip.26
Sometimes Madeleine met Felicity Baker for long walks around Kensington. Their relationship was complicated. Felicity was an academic at University College in London, and she felt that Madeleine was contemptuous of her success—Madeleine, not having followed the usual career paths in pursuit of a more creative life, and with little to show for her choice, protected herself by denigrating those who had. Felicity knew, too, that her cousin needed to control every situation. On the rare occasions when Felicity telephoned her, Madeleine immediately said she would call her back in a few minutes. It was clear that she needed time to get herself together and decide how to manage the conversation.27