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Madeleine

Page 21

by Helen Trinca


  At home, viewers of Channel 4 watched a special program anchored by arts presenter and writer Melvyn Bragg. Carmen Callil, A. S. Byatt and Will Self reviewed the shortlisted novels. They were divided on The Essence of the Thing. Callil thought it very well done but damned it with faint praise: ‘If you like Joanna Trollope, you will love this novel.’ Byatt said it was ‘the one I got the most out of; the one that really excited me’. She said it had to be read not as if written by Joanna Trollope but as if by Kafka. ‘It is a book about people living in a kind of smoke of thinness; they have nothing to say. It doesn’t mean they don’t suffer, but they have no concepts,’ she said. Will Self did not agree. He was a thirty-something-year-old London professional, but the novel, ostensibly set in his world, did not resonate with him. Self said that he knew no one who resembled Madeleine’s characters. But when Gillian Beer summarised each novel for the audience, she described The Essence of the Thing as:

  a serious comedy about grief. [St John] makes the reader know what splitting up can mean; we hear the people crack and split through her frugal, perfectly poised dialogue. She [has] children speak, rare in fiction. Taking a very narrow social group she uncovers profound differences of relationship within it.30

  The summaries over, Beer announced The God of Small Things the winner. There was a whisper of disapproval around the Guildhall. The Guardian’s Lisa Jardine wrote later that ‘the critics seemed determined to trash Arundhati Roy before the words were out of Professor Beer’s mouth’.31 In the fallout, The Essence of the Thing scarcely rated a mention. The evening over, Christopher Potter accompanied Madeleine into the deserted streets to search for a taxi.

  It was disappointing for Madeleine, but the Booker experience opened new doors as well as some old ones that had been closed for years. Friends in Australia wrote to Madeleine to congratulate her. Jane Holdsworth rounded up the gang from Kensington Church Street for a supper party for Madeleine. The guests watched the Channel 4 telecast on tape and agreed that Madeleine looked terrific.32

  Madeleine was still churning through people, pulling them in and spitting them out. Celia Irvine and David Bambridge, her friends from All Saints, dropped away. Jacqueline Bateman, a friend of Celia’s, continued to visit Madeleine, stopping by at Colville Gardens with a bottle of wine every few weeks. She enjoyed their chats about everything from grammar to the British aristocracy, but she knew Madeleine was ‘capable of being very rude to people; she treated people as if she was the headmistress to five-year-old kids. She could be terribly autocratic.’33 They agreed on their favourite book—Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49—but decided his other works, V and Gravity’s Rainbow, were ‘as boring as batshit’. Then, one day in the autumn of 1997, home after a summer in Barbados and a side trip to Cuba, Jacqueline went to Colville Gardens with a copy of a fashion magazine from the 1930s that she had bought from a street market in Havana. It should have been the perfect gift for Madeleine. But, as often happened when one of her friends went out of their way to spoil her, Madeleine reacted badly. It was as if she was pre-empting the abandonment that she connected with intimacy. It was the last time Jacqueline saw her.

  It was much the same with Colette and Aaron. With the royalties from her books, Madeleine flew them both to London for Christmas. But the visit went badly. ‘It was monstrous to be there,’ Colette recalled. ‘Part of the problem was she was so terribly sick and she was pretending not to be.’34 Aaron turned twelve that December. He was disappointed with the lack of family warmth from Madeleine. But when Colette was out of the flat, she would sit him down at the dining table and instruct him in etiquette. Aaron recalled: ‘I saw it as a loving act, the first time anyone sat down and said—this is how you act.’ It reminded him of visiting his grandparents, Ted and Val. He did not begrudge his aunt: ‘She was trying to help me, better me.’35

  In 1998 Madeleine welcomed Libby Smith, one of the Octopus gang from Sydney University days. She and Madeleine had lost touch when Libby joined the Sydney Push, married, had children and worked in New Guinea and Canberra. But they re-established contact after the Booker publicity. The plump young Madeleine of the 1960s was now fashionably thin. Libby thought that she had all but stopped eating. She found Madeleine still ‘gentle and kind’ on one level but also ‘hypocritical and judgmental’. She seemed hostile to Australia, a terrible snob and much more conservative in her views than when she had been young. Madeleine bought tickets to the West End production of Oklahoma! starring Hugh Jackman, but was upset when she discovered Jackman, whom she admired, was Australian.

  She was enjoying the fame of the Booker and had ‘a sense of vanity’ about living at a Notting Hill address. She was still keen to educate Libby in all sorts of things, including the correct form of manners to adopt if, by chance, they were invited to a country home for the weekend. It was a disappointing encounter for Libby. At university, she had looked up to Madeleine, but now her old friend seemed trapped in a past that no longer existed.36

  Madeleine continue to let her friends down. Esther Whitby was working on a memoir of her days at Andre Deutsch and wrote with some feeling of her former client, ‘Madeleine St John, whom I would go to see in her fifth-floor eyrie overlooking or, rather, confronting, the spire of the church to which she made frequent visits.’ She was:

  clever and delightfully eccentric, she was one of the most amusing people I have known. She was also one of the most malicious. I wish I could remember what she said when over a cup of tea at the Chelsea Flower Show, after a particularly savage remark I told her this, with something like admiration…At this time her star had not yet risen. It was only a year or so later when the first of her god-laced-with-adulterous-upper-class-sex novels was shortlisted for the Booker that among the flurry of excited phone calls from friends who still worked at Deutsch and thought of her as ‘my author’ her voice was absent.37

  In Sydney, in the aftermath of the Booker publicity, Chris Tillam went in search of ‘relics’ from their marriage. He sent Madeleine a bundle of letters she had written to Joan and the book of photographs that she had compiled in her last days in Boston. He apologised for waiting so long to return a couple of family mementoes. ‘As for the little book, Joan had it for thirty years, you should have it for the next thirty,’ Chris wrote. He told his ex-wife that he had ‘tried to read your novels, but they’re not my cup of tea’.38 Madeleine did not reply.

  She had always found ‘The World’ to be a ‘very funny place, which we never quite get used to’.39 As she got older, and her world narrowed to Colville Gardens, she began to focus more than ever on her childhood. She spent hours talking to Sarah Lutyens about the road from the centre of Sydney to the house she lived in in Watsons Bay as a child. Images of the past were seared in her memory, but she was a British citizen now and she was angry at the Australian press for claiming her as an Australian.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  A Sense of Betrayal

  Four years after Ted’s death, Madeleine was still owed $5000 of the $10,000 allocated to her in his will. She wrote to Val asking for the money and for Colette’s bequest to be paid. Madeleine had few compunctions about the demands. She had always felt Ted owed her money from her Cargher grandparents and that he had not supported her when she needed help in London. To Madeleine, scraping by in London, her father and Val looked well off.

  In fact, Ted valued influence as much as money and had often pursued cases, causes and projects that did not deliver high fees. And he was ‘hopeless with money’.1 He had left Val asset rich but cash poor and she struggled to pay his bequest to Madeleine. Ted and Val had thought the Clifton Gardens house would fund their later years, but they were caught by the property slump at the end of the 1980s and sold Vino del Mar for a relatively low price. They bought a less expensive property at Bayview on the northern beaches, with the aim of living on the money left over. But they were soon running out of cash, and in 1994 Ted tried unsuccessfully to sell their Mt Elliot holiday house. When Ted died, Val converted the
downstairs area at Bayview into a self-contained flat to rent and kept the Mt Elliot property on the market. She sent Madeleine $5000 and gave Colette $3200 over the next three or four years, but it was not until mid-1998 that she sold part of the Mt Elliot land, for well below the anticipated price.2 Patrick bought one of the blocks to help his mother.

  When Val received Madeleine’s letter asking for the remaining $5000, she wrote back that she was ‘saddened that you have so little trust in me as to write as you did. However I do understand your frustration at the delay.’3 She outlined her financial situation and said that the ‘boys have received nothing and in fact Patrick has been helping me’. Val explained that contracts had been exchanged on the Mt Elliot block and that the settlement would take place at the end of July:

  You may be sure that all sums will be sent off as soon as possible after that. Also, after the payment of my debts, I hope to be able to do something to help Colette with Aaron. I haven’t had a chance to tell you how pleased we were to hear of your Booker Prize nomination and also how much I have enjoyed your novels. With love, Val.4

  Madeleine was astounded. She did not believe there was so little money in Ted’s estate. She wrote back, demanding an explanation of how Ted had managed to die ‘virtually penniless’:

  That my late father should have made bequests totalling $50,000 which he hadn’t the assets to cover, plus the simple fact itself of his being unable to leave even $50,000 behind, is so entirely out of character and beyond all probability that one is left in a state of total confusion; and that you yourself should at a stroke have been abandoned to the state of penury you describe after having enjoyed, while he lived, a more than adequate income, only compounds the confusion.5

  Two weeks later, Val wrote to say the money would be deposited forthwith. She tried to explain:

  As I have said, I have had to live frugally in the past four years but I was never living in penury. The loss of Ted is still an aching void but nonetheless I live a very good life with a loving family and a large circle of friends who include me in their activities…Yes, we lived comfortably. We were never rich; we always seemed to have a big overdraft. I am proud of the fact that throughout his career T gave so much time and effort to the causes of justice, the underprivileged, international peace and the environment. He often worked without fee and if you remember at the time we brought you to Sydney for a holiday he worked for 6 months on the infamous Chelmsford case for ‘legal aid’, which scarcely covered his overheads. To be sure, living in that lovely house at Clifton Gardens was perhaps beyond our means, especially in the lean parliamentary years and before he returned to the bar but it gave us great pleasure and as we paid off the mortgage over 25 years we knew that we would sell it to pay for our retirement. We had no pension or superannuation but chose to invest in the real estate of our home instead. As you know, during his retirement, T worked tirelessly on the causes of world peace—his book and the World Court Project. A large amount of money was spent in the process (lobbying at the UN in New York, attending conferences, research books, etc). I was happy for this to happen as I was proud of what he was doing and I shared in all his undertakings. To be sure, we also had holidays, which we perhaps could not afford, but these were wonderful times and amongst our happiest memories. He had a very hard life with enormous pressures and I am so happy that he had these special interludes. Also I rejoice that I spent a lot of money on a slap-up 75th birthday party for him so that his friends and family could praise him to his face and that he could hear the things which we were not to hear again until his death.6

  Val told Madeleine that if Ted had lived, they would have been forced to take a mortgage on Bayview till the Mt Elliot land sold, so short were they of cash. She had had a tough time with her stepdaughters, and Madeleine’s demands brought back those old stresses. In that same 1998 letter she wrote:

  Madeleine, I have recently been sorting family papers and came across a loving card from you in November 1989 to us both after we had visited you in London. That was the last time I saw you and I remember what a pleasant occasion it was and how I was conscious still of my affection for you. When Ted and I married in 1955, I did my best to care for you with love and sympathy. I, at 27, didn’t try to take the place of your mother but wanted to care for you and make up for the difficult time that you had had…It appears that I did not meet your needs and I am sorry for that but I loved you and did my best for you. Your criticism of me at the time was that I tried too hard. Now I am afraid that your feelings towards me have turned to hostility and I am sorry. Wishing that things were different between us, with love, Val.7

  On Val’s instruction Ted’s solicitors sent Madeleine a copy of her father’s will. Madeleine knew now just how far he had gone to stop her getting an equal share with her sister and half-brothers.

  It ought to have been the end of the matter, but there were more recriminations to come. In November 1998, HQ magazine published a long profile of Madeleine written by Jane Cornwell, an Australian freelance journalist in London. It was based on Cornwell’s conversations with people in London and Australia, an interview with Madeleine and material provided by Ed and Val. Madeleine had initially refused an interview. Cornwell spoke to Bruce Beresford, who suggested to Madeleine the article was a good idea because it would help with his efforts to raise funds for the film of The Women in Black. Madeleine was greatly influenced by Bruce. She thought him ‘a really cool guy, so unaffected, so untouched. Like somebody holy really.’8

  In the end Madeleine granted the interview, believing it to be ‘on the quite explicit undertaking that the family (evidently of some initial interest to the author of this piece) would not form any part of the inquiry—let alone constitute its reason for being’. She expected the article to deal ‘wholly with The Women in Black plans for film of, friendship at Syd. Uni with B. Beresford et al, etc…’ and the interview would be confined to ‘strictly anodyne, non-family non-private matters’.9 Jane Cornwell interviewed Madeleine at Colville Gardens and Steve Pyke took photographs.

  Cornwell liked her subject, and the article in the November/December issue of the magazine was largely sympathetic. Headed ‘The Essence of an Expat’, it ran over five pages. There was the usual Madeleine attack on an ignorant Australian audience, and Cornwell neatly captured a writer, defensive yet intelligent, acerbic and amusing. On the final page Madeleine was quoted describing Ted as ‘around the bend’ and her family as ‘dickheads’.10 Later, Madeleine claimed that she had made the comment about dickheads in the context of Ed St John’s 1997 article in the Sydney Morning Herald. She had told Jane Cornwell that Ed’s decision to ‘publish his account of my private life and griefs was the action of a dickhead’.11 Cornwell’s article continued:

  Madeleine St John avoids listing specific grievances against her father but maintains that his whole goal in life was to upset her and her sister Colette as much as possible. ‘Basically,’ she asserts, ‘he was around the bend.’ She is equally scathing about other members of her estranged family: she loathes her stepmother Valerie and says it’s impossible therefore, to have a relationship with her half-brothers Ed, Patrick and Oliver. ‘Me and my sister are in one armed camp, they’re in the other.’12

  Invited to respond, Ed defended his parents and expressed pride in his half-sister. He and Val provided a handmade birthday card Madeleine had sent Ted, to show the relationship had not always been dysfunctional. Madeleine was appalled. She went through the article line by line, annotating the offending sentences, the ‘gross misrepresentation’ and ‘serious falsehoods’.13

  She engaged Sydney law firm Tress Cocks & Maddox for advice on a possible defamation action against ACP, the publishers of HQ. She was outraged at the reproduction of the birthday card and vowed to defend the copyright of her letters. Sarah Lutyens worried that Madeleine was obsessed with the case and was wasting her time and money.

  Madeleine felt Cornwell had obtained the interview ‘under false pretences’. She believed she had
been duped.14 She was adamant she had ‘never spoken about, much less discussed or in any other way published, family matters—history of, relationships with, feelings about, or any other aspect whatsoever—with any journalist, freelance or other, anywhere, at any time’. She was angry at Val and Ed for ‘collaborating’ with Cornwell and she insisted that:

  none of the statements, feelings, attitudes or etc etc etc imputed to me concerning the family in the article originated with me. They are all, in other words, false, mendacious, fanciful and—in that they imply my having talked about these private matters in the press, if not for other reasons in addition—defamatory.15

  Madeleine’s reaction was extreme, but not surprising. She was pathological in her desire to control her environment and interactions. But she had been naïve about the processes of journalism and publicity. Cornwell had followed usual practice, using some material already published and comments that Madeleine considered throwaway lines. A more pragmatic person might have brushed the article aside. But Madeleine was not easily pacified: in a letter to her lawyers on 14 May 1999, she sought redress. She said that ‘as injurious as any single item’ in the article was the general implication that she had ‘actually sat down one day’ with a journalist and discussed intimate, private matters. She was upset at suggestions in the article that she was ‘batty’ and involved in an ‘alleged’ family feud.16

 

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