Madeleine (10 page)

Madeleine was still under her father's financial control, but she was trying to carve out a life separate from Ted and Val and Colette. During the swot vac before the university exams, Madeleine chose not to study at home. Instead she joined other Octopus girls in a house at Avalon on Sydney's northern beaches, enjoying a holiday atmosphere as they revised their first year of university work. When the exams were over, the Octopus joined Mungo MacCallum and others in an Angry Penguins–style prank in the
Australian Women's Weekly
, posing as members of the ‘Students' Progress Association' who were ‘proud to be squares'. Madeleine smiled coyly for the camera, along with her friends.
²⁹

In February the following year they were back on campus. The
Sydney
Morning Herald
published a series of photos about events being held at the university for Orientation Week. There they all are, with the assurance of students heading into second year—Madeleine and Marilyn and Jane and Sue and Helen dutifully helping Clive James prepare a special issue of
Honi Soit
for a new group of freshers.
³⁰

Late in her life, Madeleine was bitter about her university experience. She said she had arrived on campus thinking it was an institution devoted to the truth but had been badly let down.
³¹
She overlooked the happy times on stage or gathered around the tables in Manning House. Friends' recollections show a more complex and varied experience.

Madeleine's novels do not touch on campus life, and in 2004 when she recorded several hours of tape about these early years she scarcely mentioned her time at Sydney University. She forgot the joy of that first, brilliant year when she threw off her duffel coat and took to the boards as Lolita Montez.

CHAPTER SEVEN
Adrift in Castlecrag

By early 1960, Ted and Val were living in their dream home overlooking magnificent Chowder Bay on Sydney Harbour. They took out a hefty mortgage to pay the £16,000 for Vino del Mar, a Spanish mission-style mansion built in 1936 for a Swedish sea captain.
¹
Designed by the Sydney architect Alan Stafford after he returned to Australia from California, 30a Morella Road, Clifton Gardens, had a touch of Beverly Hills glamour, with its high ceilings, heavy timber work, wrought-iron chandeliers, stone-flagged terrace and manicured gardens running down to the harbour. There was even a maid's quarters at the back. The craftsmanship was superb, but it was a derivative building, light years away from the innovation that drove design at Castlecrag.

Moving to Clifton Gardens drew a line under Ted's first marriage and family. Val had suffered three miscarriages since Oliver's birth, but was now pregnant with the couple's second child, Edward, who would be born in September. And there would be a third son, Patrick, in 1963. Ted's second family would grow up in Vino del Mar, but he gave Madeleine, aged just eighteen, her marching orders at the end of 1959, not long after her first-year university exams.
²
He felt he had no choice given the tensions between Madeleine and Val. He offered Madeleine a regular allowance to live away from home, but Madeleine was distraught; once again she believed her father was rejecting her. She and Tina Date had composed a ditty:

We're moving our house of strife

To Mosman to start a new life

I'll drown Madeleine as soon as I can

And kill off Colette with a knife
.
³

Now it was coming true. Madeleine dashed out of the Balmoral flat and ran through the dark to Pom Jarvis. She lacked the confidence to search for digs in Sydney. She was witty, not worldly—in her own words nothing less than a ‘blithering idiot'.
⁴
Madeleine was unhappy at home and she wanted new experiences, but the outside world filled her with trepidation. Later, when Pom tackled Val and Ted about the decision, Val replied, ‘That girl made me lose three babies.'
⁵

Madeleine turned to Edmund and Lorna Harvey in Castlecrag. Lorna wanted to help but had two teenage children and could not see her way clear to taking Madeleine in.
⁶
Friedel Souhami came to the rescue. Her husband had recently died and her only child Renate had left home. Friedel welcomed the company and she was happy to do Ted a favour by looking out for his daughter. She still felt a little guilty that on the night before Sylvette died she had not responded to her invitation to call by.

Madeleine moved back to a suburb filled with memories and a secure group of adults whom she had known since her childhood. It was a family of sorts, and she found support again from older women—Pom, Lorna, Friedel, and her aunts Margaret Minchin and Pat Buckeridge, who lived just streets away. The Souhami house at 14 The Parapet delighted Madeleine. It was built from sandstone that had been quarried in the area. Inside, a huge fireplace dominated the living area and the Bauhaus furniture that the Souhamis had brought with them from Europe before the war looked perfect.

Friedel was excellent company for a young woman: she spoke openly of contraception and sex, and her independence impressed Madeleine and the friends she sometimes brought home from university. When Libby Smith visited she was struck by Friedel's strength: the older German woman was a powerful role model for the wide-eyed teenager.
⁷
Friedel was a good cook—her Russian Salad was renowned throughout the Crag. ‘For thirty people', the handwritten recipe went, ‘take sixteen pieces of potato, eight pieces of beetroot, six herring, four apples…' Four nights a week, Friedel was home late from her job at the Berlitz language school and Madeleine went over to the Harveys' to watch television with Didy and Antony.

Madeleine spoke openly to friends about her sense of rejection. Winton Higgins was sure that Ted was paying her to stay away.
⁸
But Madeleine still visited Ted and Val at Clifton Gardens and enjoyed being part of an extended and privileged family that was listed in
Debrett's.
She seemed immensely proud of being the daughter of a barrister, while still dismissing her stepmother.

Left at home in Clifton Gardens, fifteen-year-old Colette began to clash badly with her father. Ted had directed most of his anger at Madeleine, but now he turned to Colette, who found his wrath ‘crashing down' on her. Colette was upset at the transformation in her father. Ted had been different before Sylvette's death—he was warm and playful. ‘The local children used to jump on his stomach; he used to give us aeroplane rides,' she recalled. Now he was severe: ‘What's your grievance, girl?' ‘Where's your gratitude, girl?' ‘Look me in the eye, girl!' Colette dreamed of dying her hair red and escaping to a country town and a job at Woolworths.
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Ted and Val held regular play readings in the house where the raised entrance hall and sunken living room created a stage and auditorium. Ted was passionate about literature and the arts and had loved being around artists at Merioola and Castlecrag. Clifton Gardens was far from bohemian, and the play readings were an effort to pursue those interests in a more suburban setting. Ted was thrilled by classical music, turning it up to full volume at weekends.
¹⁰

Sometimes Madeleine used Vino del Mar for an evening of the occult with the Octopus girls. Val and Ted welcomed the group but left them alone to experiment with contacting the supernatural using a Ouija board.
¹¹

On campus, the Octopus girls had a lot of fun. In May 1960, Madeleine performed in Armand Salacrou's
The Plate Breaker
. Richard Wherrett, who would go on to be the founding director of the Sydney Theatre Company, played the stagehand. In July and August, Madeleine had a role when the other campus theatre group, the Players, staged the e. e. cummings surrealist play
him
, directed by Ken Horler, another student who would go on to be an important director. Colleen Olliffe featured alongside John Bell; Sue McGowan was on makeup; Richard Walsh was business manager.
¹²
Madeleine demonstrated strong physical presence on stage: in one role she had to stand and do nothing. A reviewer noted that she did so with verve and aplomb!
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Madeleine was acquiring some notoriety, swanning into lectures draped in layers of clothing and wearing oversized sunglasses. One day she took on Gerry Wilkes, the colourful professor of English who had a strong following among the undergraduates. They enjoyed his lectures, which were punctuated by quotes from poems such as Louis MacNeice's ‘Bagpipe Music':

It's no go the Yogi-Man, it's no go Blavatsky,

All we want is a bank balance and a bit of skirt in a taxi.
¹⁴

But this day, it was Madeleine who received the plaudits. She arrived late and was ordered out by an angry Wilkes. She refused to leave. He insisted, then slowly left the podium and walked up the stairs as if to remove her physically from her seat. There were howls of disapproval and Wilkes was left looking foolish as Madeleine held her ground.

By now some of the Octopus girls were going their separate ways. Sue McGowan and Mungo MacCallum were lovers, and Danne Emerson and Bruce Beresford were among the most glamorous of the couples on campus. Madeleine was ready for a boyfriend. And he came in the shape of Christopher Tillam, a second-year student who lived at St Paul's College. Chris had noticed Madeleine around campus even though the ‘Paulines' traditionally held themselves slightly apart.

It was at a party in the Vaucluse flat of John Fenton-Smith that the arty mob from SUDS and
Honi Soit
encountered the St Paul's men. It was the end of 1960, just after exams. Madeleine, at close quarters, was intense: Chris recalled much later that she had been a ‘fierce kisser' that night. Madeleine knew Chris had a girlfriend but, as the party ended, she announced, ‘I'll be your holiday girl.' Within days, she had arranged to meet Chris again, inviting him to her Cargher grandparents' flat, which was close to where he was staying with his mother for the university break.

Chris's mother, Joan, had separated from her husband, Roger, the previous year and was living independently in a gracious block called Brantwood Hall in New South Head Road. Roger, like Ted, was a lawyer, although a senior partner in a law firm rather than a barrister. Joan was an artist who studied at the Julian Ashton Sydney Art School in the 1920s and later at the George Street studio run by Grace Crowley and Rah Fizelle.

Chris grew up in a bungalow in Morella Road, Clifton Gardens, just two houses from Vino del Mar, but by the time Val and Ted moved into the street, he had decamped for college. He was an only child and had spent most of his life at boarding school, but he loved coming home for holidays, which were filled with swimming and sailing. Joan was thirty-nine when Chris was born in 1941, and in the following years was often ill with asthma and tuberculosis. Her family was financially comfortable and well connected but Joan held a deep secret about the circumstances of the death in 1930 of her father, Harry Vernon Dixon, a successful company executive who ran the Colonial Sugar Refinery company.

Chris's classmates at Barker College included Richard Walsh and Winton Higgins. Richard and Chris were academic rivals although they were very different children—Richard was constantly in trouble throughout high school, and Chris was more studious—but they both wrote for the school's end-of-year revue. Barker College emphasised high academic achievement, and Chris did the school proud, obtaining one of the highest scores in the 1958 Leaving examinations. When the results were released, his photograph appeared on the front page of the
Sydney Morning Herald
, alongside Mungo MacCallum, another precocious scholar. Chris told the reporter from the
Herald
that he planned to study law and become a barrister.
¹⁵
The reporter did not have to go far for the interview: Chris was a copy boy at the
Herald
, a summer job secured by his father.

Leaving school and going to university was the start of a new phase for Chris, but his world imploded when his parents separated. He felt his family had evaporated overnight—just as Madeleine had after Sylvette's death. During the term, he lived at St Paul's, but he spent his holidays with Joan, who lived in a series of hotels and boarding houses after the family house was sold. For several years Chris felt that he did not really have a home.
¹⁶

When Madeleine took Chris to meet her grandparents, he felt their ‘incredible sadness'. He took away a strong impression of Feiga and Jean with their heavily accented English, their Jewish culture and their framed photographs of their daughters—Josette, away in New Guinea, and Sylvette, dead now for six years. Chris wrote later that he and Madeleine had found ‘refuge in the shadows of the ruins of two families'.
¹⁷

That summer of 1960–61, Chris dropped his girlfriend and took up with Madeleine. ‘I don't know if we were in love,' he recalled. ‘We were very interested in each other. I was fascinated by this person who was A, so literate, and B, so voracious in everything that she did. I know she read Proust—that was grist to the mill. Airmail editions of the
Observer
were
de rigueur
.'
¹⁸
Chris was clever and well read, but Madeleine led her boyfriend into new intellectual areas. They read Claude Lévi-Strauss's
Tristes Tropiques
in translation, when it was serialised in
Encounter
magazine. They went to art-house movies at the Savoy Cinema in Bligh Street and the Embassy in Castlereagh Street. Chris, especially, was interested in film, and they lapped up French and Italian movies.

Madeleine kept a copy of
Debrett's Peerage & Baronetage
on her bedside table, announcing at any opportunity: ‘I'm in
Debrett's
!' Chris, too, had a sense of his heritage—his father was a member of the Pioneers Club, which had been established for the descendants of early settlers. But he was surprised at Madeleine's interest in her genealogy: she and Ted did not get along, yet she was obsessed with her father's ancestry.
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