by Helen Trinca
Madeleine’s relationship with her friend Judith McCue, who was now living in the US, was also complex. Her letters to Judith were lively, honest and intimate. But on the phone Madeleine was often scornful and attacked Judith’s domestic happiness. Madeleine had wanted marriage and children, but now she could only survive her disappointment by dismissing the lifestyle she had not achieved.28
The patterns of Madeleine’s interactions were becoming entrenched. Over and over, she would draw people in with her loving charm, intelligence, creativity and high values. But before long she would create a crisis or an argument, driving away friends who were left bewildered by her behaviour. Then, after a break, a card or phone call would signal a desire to resume relations. All her life, Madeleine made sure she rejected others before they could abandon her, then hauled them back on her terms.
At Colville Gardens, Madeleine was more isolated than she had been at her other London addresses. Her street in Notting Hill was quiet and there were several flights of stairs between her home and the world outside. The temptation to bed down on the couch and watch old movies in the afternoons on her old black-and-white television was strong. On the positive side, the distance from the world helped Madeleine focus on her writing, and she began to devote more time to the Blavatsky biography. In a letter to Judith in November 1986, she wrote:
A dark November day, about 5 leaves left to fall, opera on R3, cat licking his lips, clock ticking & me at an impasse or a mini-impasse having written about 1¾ chapters of MY BOOK (which took about 1 ½ months—clock that!) & in a state of the can’ts about the next bit due to having just read over typescript…29
Writing was now a part of Madeleine’s daily life, even if it was a cause of anxiety. She had a purpose. She told Judith that writing was:
guaranteed to make pretty well everything else in life seem easy-calm-& problem-free. I find myself worrying about it all the time that I am not actually writing & that is most of the time so you could say that it has changed my life really & whether or not a publishable MS emerges from the experience seems to me at the moment the merest detail.30
The following year when her half-brother Patrick and his future wife Karen visited during a tour of Europe, Madeleine announced herself as a writer.31 Blavatsky dominated her world. In June 1987 she told Judith that she was still so deeply involved in:
WRITING MY BOOK that altho’ other things sometimes loom or impinge, I know & feel them to be trivial: and I really think that, even if I never succeed, trying to become a writer, is what I am here to do…All any of us needs is a role and mine seems after all to be to scribble, & doing that as well as I possibly can is the only thing of real importance…Of course, I should love to succeed, crash through, earn my keep, even contribute to others’, but at this stage it is the doing which possesses my thoughts and energies.32
Madeleine was living on social services. Prime minister Margaret Thatcher, Mrs Hacksaw as Madeleine called her, was cutting a swathe through welfare but the ‘Other England’ continued behind the scenes. Madeleine wrote to Judith that the government had tightened the rules on benefits, but that at the unemployment office, staff were sympathetic and happy to keep the payments going to people like her who were ‘grooving away on their little enterprises, books, painting, perpetual motion machines, God knows what’.33 But the Thatcher cutbacks were changing the England that Madeleine knew and loved. In May 1990, she told Judith that the country was ‘going to the Rottweilers, everyone here hates Maggie now but it’s too late: her work is effectively done. Sans divine intervention (& we know how disobliging that can be) I fear that English civilisation as we have known & loved it is kaput.’34 It was becoming clear to Madeleine that she would need to earn some money if she wanted to remain in London.
Madeleine and Colette had last seen each other in Sydney in 1980. Not long after, Colette set off for the US. In Santa Fe, she met Steve Lippincott, a student fourteen years her junior. He fell for Colette with her charm and ability to fill the room with her gypsy spirit and laughter. They married six months later, and by 1981 they were back in Sydney, at first living with Ted and Val at Vino del Mare. Steve found work in publishing and Colette worked as a couturier. For a time she was involved in the Coo-ee Emporium, which was set up as a showcase for indigenous art and crafts by her friend Louise Ferrier.
By the mid-1980s the Lippincotts were living in Melbourne. But once again Colette was on the edge. She found help in a radical psychotherapy program, which required patients to commit to live in at a facility all week for up to two years and to take part in intensive therapy. Colette felt she had found people who took her problems seriously, and she began to make progress. She and Steve spent weekends together and soon Colette was pregnant. Aaron was born in 1985, and sixteen months later, the Lippincotts returned to the US.
In London, Madeleine finally completed the Blavatsky biography. She wrote the last sentence on Guy Fawkes Day 1987, ‘while rockets zoomed through the skies of Notting Hill’. It was the week before her forty-sixth birthday and she immediately began to think about her next book.35 She was truly hooked on writing. In March, she wrote to Colleen Chesterman in Sydney:
Whether it will eventually find a publisher is very problematical, but: it was the most fantastic fun to do. After writing, everything else is rather boring…PS Writing a book is nothing like writing an essay…i.e. it is not a drag, On s’amuse bien!36
Madeleine gave the manuscript to Christine Hill, who had worked in publishing, to read for comment and criticisms. The first hundred pages had been read by ‘horribly clever (New Coll. Oxford philosophy) person who was fairly complimentary’. So was Christine. ‘Madeleine was not capable of being a bad writer,’ she said. It was not a simplistic demolition job on theosophy. The manuscript was ‘dispassionate and funny’, although, Christine thought, it needed more work.37
But Madeleine’s efforts to find a publisher went nowhere, and in the following year she gave part of the manuscript to an agent. She was worried the book was ‘too eccentric for serious consideration’ with ‘awkward & complicated material fairly well put together’. She gave herself a B+. The style, she told Judith, was ‘flashy & vulgar’.38
Her assessment may have been an attempt to protect herself from disappointment. She told Judith that she thought she had better try to write a novel, that ‘the business of a writer must be, to write & go on writing until she scores a hit: and after that too’. She professed a motive beyond success, saying: ‘It would be divine to score of course: but that, as my beloved music teacher would say, is not IT.’39
This period was a relatively happy one for Madeleine. There were visits from Australian friends and family. Colleen and Michael Chesterman were in London in the autumn of 1988 and Madeleine urged them to stay with her. The following year she saw Ted and Val when they spent time in the UK. The visit went well enough.40 Ted was now immersed in research of his own. He had been out of politics for twenty years but was active in the nuclear and peace movements. In 1984 he was part of an unsuccessful campaign to elect Midnight Oil lead singer Peter Garrett as a Nuclear Disarmament Party senator. That same year he worked with poet Les Murray to compose ‘The Universal Prayer for Peace: a Prayer for the Nuclear Age’. And he supported the World Court Project, which petitioned the International Court of Justice to outlaw nuclear weapons.41 Now he was researching his anti-nuclear book, Judgment at Hiroshima, a work some in his family felt to be a magnificent folly, not unlike Madeleine’s Blavatsky biography.42
Back in Sydney after their visit to London, Val and Ted were delighted to receive a ‘loving card’ from Madeleine.43 The tension between Madeleine and her father and stepmother was never far below the surface, but Madeleine was capable of great sweetness.
By May 1990, Madeleine was lamenting she had lost a recent ‘jobette’ and was surviving on freelance copy-editing for James Hughes, a publisher she knew through the ashram. He had been given the name Jai Narain by Swami-ji. Madeleine was still hoping the Blavatsky book
would earn her some money. She told Judith that the biography had been assessed by three publishers and a new agent, all of whom had pronounced it to be ‘fascinating, definitely, but there’s really no market for this sort of thing’. Madeleine felt she would have to think of a fresh angle, but had put the topic on the ‘back burner whence it may in due course simply boil away: such a pity’. She told Judith that ‘I somehow feel (not for quite the first time) that life is beyond my capacities…meanwhile am trying to write some fiction, which is abominably difficult & therefore terrific—but horrifying’.44
Six months later she was clinging to hope but told Judith that she would have to ‘think up some Gee Whiz selling-point’ for the biography which had now ‘failed to excite 5 or 6 assorted agents & publishers’.45 James Hughes felt the book was not well researched and was a ‘bit of a rant’ rather than a coherent challenge to theosophy. He thought Madeleine was distinctly unimpressed by Blavatsky and could not disguise her dislike of her subject, and he told Madeleine that her book was not working.46 She had not developed the discipline to focus her material: she was smart and had a keen imagination, but she was not yet the writer she yearned to be.
Madeleine was still vulnerable to emotional low points. On 8 May 1990, she talked openly in a letter to Judith about her continuing battle to understand existence. Judith’s mother had recently died, and Madeleine consoled her:
this life really is a pig, there’s just no 2 ways about it, and what we have to cling on to is so frail. Apart from God, of course: who can be very, very difficult—I at present tend to feel that He is not only an Englishman (this was always pretty obvious) but also educ at a Great Public School & Oxbridge (not Sandhurst): adorable, of course, & clever, my goodness, and good & courteous & charming, but temperamental not to say perfectly neurotic…& downright confused not to say deeply illogical attitude to women—!!! The poor thing tends to conceal (if not to deny) his feelings, until they break out in a great storm which frightens the cattle for miles in every direction…By which you will deduce that I have formed yet another ill-advised attachment to as fine a specimen of English Social Class 2 manhood as a wee colonial could hope to see—never mind feel—which latter I have little realistic hope of doing, actually. [I want to] experience the liaisonette as an educational experience & and not simply yet another draught of bliss & pain. (But ah, such pain! Such bliss! Such idiocy!)47
Madeleine did not reveal the name of her new lover and adopted an ironic tone in comparing a contrary God with the repressed Englishmen to whom she was so often attracted. But, despite her humour, she could not hide her disappointment and pain. Her ‘liaisonette’ was probably already on the skids, she told Judith.
In the early 1990s, Madeleine saw Felicity Baker regularly. They met for lunch and afternoon tea, and Felicity shouted Madeleine to a performance of a new play, The Singer, at the Barbican, with Anthony Sher in the lead. The outing began well but Madeleine was bored by the play and at interval she screamed at her cousin: ‘Why did you bring me to this?’, before stalking out, leaving Felicity shocked at such a public display of bad manners. A few months later, in typical style, Madeleine telephoned her cousin as if nothing had happened, and their contact resumed.48
In October 1990, it was all ‘madness & melancholy’ at Colville Gardens. A fire in Madeleine’s flat had destroyed her kitchen and she had builders in. Madeleine told Judith the year had been ‘truly astounding in a small domestic way’ and she was now ‘thin (actually scrawny) sleepless, chain-smoking and in a word mad or at any rate more evidently incompetent than ever & all dare say my own fault’.49 Still, Madeleine had seen the ‘amusing side’ of events. She had just spent ten days in the south of France with Tonia Date, who had rescued her from the mayhem in her flat. It was six months after her first mention of her ‘liaisonette’, and Madeleine referred obliquely to the affair. She told Judith she was not really worried yet about her finances:
because the sensation grows on me increasingly, that this life really is a ridiculous & absurd game which it is fatal to take too seriously—although of course one does when one’s affections are aroused. I suppose it really is true in some deep way that love is the only permanent actuality. Or art, or something. Not just a fire & builders.50
By December, Madeleine had a job filing documents for a freelance investment banker. Her wage was not enough to live on and her financial situation was even more dire than usual. Ted sent her a combined birthday and Christmas cheque of $150. Madeleine was so insulted that she sent it back with what she described as a ‘cool, calm, collected letter’ telling her father he owed her money.51
Over the next few years, this claim would become a huge issue between Madeleine and her father and stepmother. More than forty years earlier, in 1948, Ted and Sylvette had been given a sum of money by the Carghers to help them build their house in Castlecrag. A decade later, Ted sold the house and used the funds to buy the mansion at Clifton Gardens. It appears Ted did not repay Jean and Feiga; indeed it is not clear whether they expected him to. But Madeleine believed this money belonged now to her and Colette, that it was part of the Cargher, not the St John, estate.52 Madeleine wrote to Judith:
I can’t tell you how very grown up it makes me feel to have pronounced these words to the ghastly old ratbag at last but frankly darling I am not greatly looking forward to his apoplectic reply…At least I won’t have to be grateful for any more 50–60 pound annual offerings from this retired QC MP fraud.53
Ted was indeed livid and wrote in scathing terms to his daughter. He felt he did not have a legal or a moral duty to send any money to Madeleine. In any case, he did not have the money.54
Madeleine described 1990 as ‘wonderful, ghastly, I wouldn’t have missed it for anything’.55 She had turned the corner with her writing and by May 1991, she had completed her first novel. She had found writing fiction much easier than writing biography, indeed The Women in Black had been ‘disgracefully easy’.56 She had written it in about six months.
And now she finally gave up ‘the struggle on behalf of Madame Blavatsky’.57 The biography had beaten her. She hung on to the manuscript for a while, and then she tore it up. There was ‘something rather grand about throwing away so many years of work’. Women never knew when to leave, she felt. They always clung on. It was a great day, Madeleine would say later, the day she took hold of the Blavatsky book and ‘chucked it out’.58
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Women in Black
Madeleine had been writing plots in her head for years and she had a certain confidence in her ability. ‘I could do better than that,’ she announced to Florence Heller, while listening to a book reading on Radio 4.1 She had an ear for dialogue. Years of sitting on London buses and walking the streets had honed her facility with the vernacular. She understood tone and distinctions of class. These skills hadn’t helped her much with Madame Blavatsky, but they were superb for fiction. Madeleine wrote quickly, on her typewriter or longhand on the back of council notices and flyers thrust through the letterbox. She enjoyed making do with whatever was at hand.
Madeleine had lived outside of Australia for almost thirty years, but now she turned to the Sydney of her childhood and teenage years. The Women in Black, set largely in a department store called Goode’s in the 1960s, sparkles with hope and humanity. Madeleine was still experiencing inner turmoil but she believed that there were enough sad novels in the world.2 That she wrote a light-hearted novel set in Sydney is, however, extraordinary given what the city represented to her. Sydney was the ‘gothic’ city associated with the tragic death of Sylvette and the stepmother who had replaced her so quickly at Castlecrag. It was the city of the father who had rejected her and the location of her loss and abandonment. But she put her anger aside to write about the past with affection and forgiveness. Indeed, while The Women in Black is not autobiographical, writing it was likely therapeutic, allowing Madeleine to enjoy a more idealised version of her home city.
Madeleine drew on the people sh
e knew for many of her characters. The most spectacular example of art imitating life is Magda, the saleswoman in charge of Model Gowns at Goode’s. Magda is a Slovenian immigrant married to a Hungarian, Stefan. Husband and wife are exotic, glamorous and sophisticated. Magda’s confident European sensibility sets her apart from the other ‘women in black’ who are good, solid types, but who cannot match Magda’s style and exuberance. It is easy to see Madeleine crafting Magda as a blend of her French mother and Friedel Souhami, the German immigrant whom Madeleine knew in Castlecrag. In the 1930s, before her marriage to Ted, Sylvette sold cosmetics and, like all the Cargher women, she adored clothes and saw them as objects of beauty. Clothes mattered to Madeleine: she was always a ‘considered’ dresser, one friend recalled.3
The teenager in The Women in Black—the school-leaver Lesley, who adopts the more sophisticated name of Lisa when she goes to work at Goode’s for the summer—shares Madeleine’s sensibilities, though Lisa’s family is lower middle-class, a few rungs down from the St Johns. Unlike Lisa, Madeleine did not face family resistance to her going to university, but she claimed that had she not won a Commonwealth scholarship Ted would not have allowed her to go. Some of Madeleine’s university friends saw Colleen Olliffe and her family as the model for Lisa’s family.4 The Olliffes lived in the unfashionable southern suburb of Kingsford, and Colleen’s father, Joe, was a proofreader. Colleen worked in the ‘Christmas rush’ at Sydney department stores.
The novel resonates with Madeleine’s emotional experience. Lisa is offered a choice between the dominant but mundane world of Anglo-Australia and the vivid future promised by the migrants arriving in Sydney after the war. Madeleine’s life as a child and teenager oscillated between these worlds, but The Women in Black rises beyond the divisions. There is acceptance as the newcomers show the Australians different ways to live and as the migrants are reshaped by their new country. It is a big idea, this clash of cultures, but lightly articulated by Madeleine. The novel is warm but not sentimental. Madeleine is amused by rather than judgmental of the society she describes. When Frank rushes away after a night of abandoned sex with his wife, Madeleine offers a telling commentary on the Australian male, but there is humour and compassion. In her fiction, Madeleine revealed a humanity she could not always summon in life.