by Helen Trinca
Madeleine made some specific orders about her life story: she wanted Judith McCue, her friend in Chicago, to ‘receive all biographical material relating to my life and that she be permitted to write a biography of me should she choose to do so’.27 In a ‘memorandum of wishes’ she told Bruce Beresford that no ‘foreign publishing rights are [to be] granted to any of my works’. And she directed Bruce to ‘seek the return of all my letters written to my father and currently held by my stepmother…and that any such letters returned are immediately destroyed’.28
She had arranged and paid for her funeral with John Nodes and Sons in Ladbroke Grove, and had asked Alex Hill to conduct her funeral. She drew up a letter detailing the ceremony: no music, no flowers and strict adherence to the Book of Common Prayer. She attached a copy of the letter to her will and noted there was another copy in the safe at All Saints. Madeleine was tying up the ends of her life. She squirrelled away a copy of the will in her flat and told Sarah Middleton where it was hidden. She left nothing to Colette or Aaron and nothing to any of the friends, not even Susannah, who had cared for her in recent years. There was no mention of Chris Tillam: there was nothing from their shared years in the 1960s that Madeleine wanted to leave to her former husband.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Her Own Story
In March 2004, Judith McCue went to an electronics shop in Chicago and bought a standard cassette recorder. She was on her way to London and she was on a mission, one she did not relish. Madeleine had asked her to record some interviews with her; she wanted to put her version of her life on the record.
Judith had lived in Chicago, with her husband Edward Kibblewhite, for the past twenty years. The couple had regularly visited Madeleine in London and there had been many letters and phone calls. Judith knew the details of Madeleine’s life, having heard them over the decades since the women met in London in the mid-1970s. She was not looking forward to going over the events again.1 Yet Madeleine prevailed, as she usually did, and on the afternoon of 23 March, Judith climbed the stairs at Colville Gardens, had a cup of tea with Madeleine, chatted about Judith’s adult daughter Jessica, and tested the recorder.2
Madeleine was finding it hard to breathe. She was hooked up to her oxygen tank day and night, and used a special mask to drive the oxygen deep into her lungs. But she was determined to record the details of her childhood. She had never written about this time, but now it was the only story that mattered. It was a lifetime since Madeleine had lived at Watsons Bay and Ryde and Castlecrag and gone to school at St Catherine’s and Queenwood. Yet those years were crystal clear in her mind. She could smell the harbour; she could hear Ms Medway; she could see her mother’s Dior copy. Most of all, she could hear her father.
On the couch beside Madeleine were photographs of her grandmother as a young girl in Romania, of her grandfather dressed for the cameras in Paris, of her mother Sylvette lined up with the other little girls for gymnastics. As she showed Judith the pictures and the Cargher passports and other documents, Madeleine sketched the family history. Here was Sylvette on the boat to Australia in the 1930s; with friends in Sydney; in the Blue Mountains with Ted and Ian Sly and his family, the men in uniform, just before they were sent overseas in 1941. Madeleine’s voice was deep, perhaps a little forced for the tape, and she battled for breath at times.
Sometimes Judith turned off the machine and Madeleine rested with a cup of tea and a little jazz in the background. Over several days, she took Judith through her early years. The longest they recorded without a break was about an hour. She was remorseless in her condemnation of her father and dismissive of her stepmother, ridiculing her beliefs and ambitions. She insisted that her mother’s death was accidental, that it was not suicide. She was understanding of her sister as a child, but attacked the adult Colette mercilessly. But it was Ted St John who dominated her commentary as she recorded his sins of omission and commission. In a few brief sentences she recounted the beating Ted gave her fifty years earlier. Sometimes Judith challenged her statements or asked questions, but Madeleine gave her short shrift. She had a story to tell and she would tell it on her terms. She was not seeking clarification or answers; she had spent decades piecing the narrative together in her head. She knew this story backwards and she wanted others to hear it.
Judith had almost nine hours of tape when it was time for her to return to Chicago, yet only half the story was told. It ended in the late sixties: Madeleine talked about her life in the United States with Chris, but said nothing of her time in London. Yet she was content. She had recorded the story that really mattered, the story of how Ted St John—lawyer, politician, activist—had, to borrow from Philip Larkin, ‘fucked her up’.
By the time she got back to Chicago, Judith was emotionally wrung out.3 Busy with her own work as a publisher, she put the tape recorder, the tapes and the notes in a cardboard box and shoved them in a closet. The final tape was left in the recorder. Judith had no desire to listen to Madeleine’s story again. What purpose would it serve to traverse the vitriolic commentary about Ted and Val and the St Catherine’s headmistress with the unfortunate facial paralysis? She loved Madeleine, but she had little interest in writing her biography.4
The tapes were an insurance policy for Madeleine. Throughout her life, she had protected her privacy. She had torn up the Blavatsky manuscript, shredded letters, destroyed old addresses as well as friendships, and done a good job of warning people off. But she did not want to be forgotten. And she wanted her version of events to stand. In many ways, it was a version of the clash of cultures depicted in The Women in Black, but this time there was no happy ending, no resolution, no reconciliation. In this story, Ted remained the villain, Sylvette the wronged woman, and Madeleine and Colette the victims of a destructive marriage and their father’s rejection.
Madeleine was intelligent and funny and she demonstrated her talent for wit and observation on the tapes. But she could not move beyond her obsessive need to prove that her mother had not suicided, that she had not deliberately abandoned her children that night at Castlecrag in 1954. For Madeleine, the tapes were proof of what had really happened in her childhood, proof too that the blame lay with ‘the ghastly Ted’ who had been the architect of the ‘fuckup’ that had been her life.5
As Madeleine approached the end of her life, the desire to secure her place in history became overwhelming. She created albums of family photographs using old brown paper and cardboard. She bundled them up with her personal papers, including the documents covering her divorce, her birth certificate, papers from her grandparents and material she had researched about the St John forebears, and she told Judith McCue that these were also part of the record. This was the biographical material she had listed in her will. Into the box went an annotated copy of the HQ article of 1998 and the legal letters that flowed from it, and correspondence about Ted’s estate and the money she believed she was owed. There were no diaries, no fragments of earlier writing, no jottings about Madame Blavatsky. There were edited copies of the manuscripts of her published novels, returned to her by her publishers, but no correspondence with her agent or publishers and no letters from her longtime correspondents. There was nothing of her time with Chris, nothing of the Ladbroke Grove ashram, nothing of her trips to France and Greece and Spain. It was as if, looking back down the decades, nothing mattered beyond ‘the Ted years’.
Madeleine had reconnected with Josette and was now saddened by her aunt’s illness with cancer. She wrote to her in hospital:
Dearest Josette, I thought I would just write a few words to you as it would probably be pretty tiring for you to talk on the phone even if possible while you are in hospital. Are they looking after you like a Princess! I should definitely hope so & after all suppose so—so that is okay. I suppose also that I needn’t tell you how terribly I regret being all tied up here to an oxygen concentrator & totally unable to fly away and see you…hold your hand & tell you a funny story or two. So instead I shall just say that Spring is rea
lly definitely here—all the ornamental cherry trees are in blossom, my street is lined with them all the way down one side—enchanting—and each day is longer than the last…6
Madeleine had never met Josette’s daughter Nicole, who was born in the 1960s in Papua New Guinea, but in the previous couple of years she had talked regularly to her by phone, keen to know about her children. Nicole enjoyed the conversations and realised how important they were to her cousin. One day Madeleine sent £50 to Nicole so she could take the children to high tea at Betty’s teashop—an old-fashioned, very English thing to do.7 She suggested Nicole needed a nanny to help with the children and offered advice from her own ‘Australian nanny’, presumably her carer Peta, about where to look for one.
With her will made, the tapes out of the way, and the biographical material collected, Madeleine decluttered her flat, giving away furniture, books and other possessions. She invited visitors to take something they wanted. A kitchen table went to Susannah, along with cookbooks. Madeleine put post-it notes on some objects specifying who should have them after her death. She purchased a new contact book and included only a handful of numbers, dumping a lifetime of friends and acquaintances. She kept only the numbers for local takeaway restaurants, for Tiger Lily’s vet and a few friends—the chosen few.
Madeleine found 2005 a difficult year. In August, she wrote to Antony Minchin:
Thank you so much for your letter & pix of so many months ago—sorry for the delay but everything is v v difficult & takes forever. I seem to have missed several chapters in the story—the last news I had of you was a message you left on my answering machine when I was in hospital at the end of—?2003? it must be…Which I was far too preoccupied to chase up at the time…In any case—congratulations on all your good news. Great to have a grandchild—especially a girl. Hope the hens are laying—can you get hold of a kind called Old Cotswold Legbar? They lay the most exquisite pale blue eggs.8
Madeleine was hospitalised twice, the doctors surprised each time that she rallied. Bruce Beresford visited her. He found her connected to all sorts of machines but uncomplaining and cheerfully lapping up the life stories of the nurses and other patients.9
Then on 26 March 2006, Josette died in Adelaide. At the funeral service, her eulogist noted how the little girl who had arrived in Sydney in the 1930s without a word of English had excelled at friendship and family despite times of great difficulty in her life.10 Madeleine felt her aunt’s death keenly. She began to telephone Josette’s husband Ron Storer in Adelaide more frequently. Ron looked forward to the calls. Madeleine was entertaining and stimulating. She asked Ron to talk about his memories of Feiga and Jean Cargher, and she offered to send Ron her childhood impressions of Josette from when they both lived in Sydney. But she told him that she was having trouble completing the task: even writing exhausted her now.11
When Judith McCue visited again, Madeleine urged her to take the box of biographical material. Judith demurred. It seemed too final—a sign that her friend would soon die.12 But Madeleine knew her time was running out. She wanted to die at home, high up in the eyrie, with the church bells marking out her days as they had done for twenty years. Ever the organiser, she put together a palliative care team. She still hoped to finish her novel, but writing was almost impossible.13
She had few visitors and only three people—Susannah Godman, Sarah Middleton and Jane Holdsworth—saw her regularly. Susannah took the load. As she put it later, she was the person who cut up the food for her. All three women drew on reserves of patience and generosity to help them manage their increasingly irascible friend. It was ‘so very easy to do the wrong thing around Madeleine’. Her taste was perfect and her manners were sublime, but she felt no shame in making others feel ill at ease about their own behaviour.
Madeleine was keen to talk but she did not say much to Susannah about her old life, the life of the ashram and Swami-ji and the friends who had been so important back then. She did not mention her aunt Florence or her cousin Felicity; Susannah was unaware Madeleine had family in London. There was little said about the St Johns back in Sydney, but Susannah was left in no doubt that Madeleine thought Colette, with whom she had no contact now, was ‘bonkers’. And Madeleine began telling Susannah that she wanted her, not Judith McCue, to look after her personal papers, contrary to the terms of her will.14 Susannah resisted. She knew Madeleine was capable of suddenly changing her mind, lashing out against those close to her without reason.
On Thursday 15 June, around lunchtime, Madeleine had a serious respiratory attack and an ambulance was called. She refused to leave her flat until Susannah came to take care of Tiger Lily, but eventually she was admitted to St Mary’s Hospital in Westminster.
When Susannah called in to see her that evening, Madeleine had perked up. Susannah saw her again on Friday evening. She was in a room of about six beds and was ‘quite jolly’.15 The friends talked about social class, Madeleine deciding that the man in the bed opposite was definitely ‘lower middle’. Madeleine spoke again in negative terms about Judith McCue and reiterated her wish for Susannah to hold on to the biographical material. Susannah was convinced Madeleine would soon be out of hospital and that the question of the will could be deferred. She was on her way out of London for the weekend to join her husband, writer Louis Barfe, at their house in Suffolk, and she felt relaxed about leaving Madeleine, certain that her friend would soon be back home again at Colville Gardens.
Then, on Sunday 18 June, the hospital rang Susannah in Suffolk. Madeleine was dead.
Susannah was devastated. Madeleine had died alone, without family or friends, in hospital, far from her beloved Tiger Lily. It seemed the loneliest of deaths.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
After Madeleine
Madeleine was gone. The Gauloises and the Golden Virginia roll-your-owns had extracted their revenge. By the end of her life, her circle had shrunk, her family had all but disappeared from her life and her books were largely out of print. Yet Madeleine continued to exert power over those she had known. Her death opened old wounds, created difficulties for her friends and saddened many of those who had seen, up close, her complicated passage through life. Susannah Godman missed Madeleine terribly. For almost a decade, she had been a weekly, sometimes daily, visitor to Colville Gardens. She had loved this intelligent, intense and vulnerable woman. But she faced the dilemma of whether to honour her friend’s deathbed wishes or follow the will Madeleine had made in 2004.1
Susannah went to St Mary’s Hospital and, as Madeleine’s designated next of kin, signed the death certificate. It stated that Madeleine had died of respiratory failure and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Jane Holdsworth made most of the calls to tell people the sad news, using the little address book that Madeleine had left. The calls were very difficult—Florence Heller and Felicity Baker had seen nothing of Madeleine in the final years. Family in Sydney were informed—they too had long been estranged.
Susannah contacted Alex Hill, whom Madeleine had asked to conduct the funeral service. He had moved to another parish and had various commitments so the funeral was delayed till 4 July.
In Sydney, journalist Tony Stephens wrote an obituary for the Sydney Morning Herald. It was published on 29 June and noted that Madeleine had been compared to Anton Chekhov, Muriel Spark and Anita Brookner.2 On 1 July, at Val’s request, Antony Minchin placed a death notice in the Herald:
ST JOHN, Madeleine—
Born Sydney November 12, 1941, died London June 18, 2006, daughter of Edward and Sylvette St John (both deceased), sister of Colette St John Lippincott and aunt of Aaron, fondly remembered by her aunts Florence Heller and Pamela St John, her friends, cousins and extended family. We were gladdened by her late career as a novelist. The Women in Black, A Pure Clear Light, The Essence of the Thing (shortlisted for the Booker Prize 1997) and A Stairway to Paradise. We were saddened by her long illness. Now she is at rest.3
Antony checked the notice with Val and Colette. Val later asked him to
add her name, but by the time he got the message, it was too late. Colette, who had been rung by the Herald to confirm the death notice, asked for Josette’s name to be included but that too missed the deadline.4
About thirty people gathered at All Saints for the funeral. Madeleine had decreed there be no eulogy, but Alex Hill decided she had set him a test. Life was a cat-and-mouse game to Madeleine and Alex believed she would have appreciated his outwitting her by speaking about her life before the service.
He told the congregation that the fact they were at the funeral meant they mattered to Madeleine—even though they may have been through hard times with her. He said she often withdrew from people. He would use the Book of Common Prayer as she had stipulated; the book had been indispensable to her, he told the mourners.
Florence Heller was comforted by his words. She had found Madeleine very trying at times and it helped that those difficulties were acknowledged by the priest.5 Sarah Lutyens felt much the same: it was reassuring to realise there were so many others who had loved Madeleine but whom she had abandoned, without explanation, over the years.6
Madeleine’s cousin, Nicole Richardson, came down from Yorkshire, but Felicity Baker did not attend the funeral. Bruce Beresford flew in from the States, and Christopher Potter was there, as were the Tooleys along with Teresa Ahern and Daniel Le Maire and his partner. Tina Date came dressed in leathers on a motorbike. Many of the mourners did not know each other because Madeleine had kept her friends so separate.
Judith McCue did not know Madeleine had died. This was not an oversight. Susannah and Jane had decided not to contact her. Their reasons were complicated: they were struggling to fulfil Madeleine’s final wishes. Susannah felt burdened by the responsibility, and she ‘put an enormous amount of thought’ into what Madeleine said to her at the end of her life. It was a terrible decision to make. Judith’s number was in Madeleine’s address book. When Madeleine had included it, she had wanted Judith to be told of her death. But the message Madeleine had sent towards the end of her life was quite different.7