Madeleine (11 page)

In the early months of their courtship Madeleine occasionally spent time with Chris at the Souhami house in Castlecrag, where his presence was tolerated by Friedel, and around the corner with the more welcoming Harveys. Madeleine took Chris on a walking tour past the St Johns' old house in The Rampart. She told him her parents had been so poor at one stage that they could not afford blinds. After his visits, Chris would walk to the crossroads at Castlecrag, well after midnight, and take a taxi back to St Paul's. Once, he stayed the night at Friedel's. But Madeleine and he did not sleep together. They were taking things slowly.

Madeleine moved across the harbour to a boarding house at 18 Billyard Avenue, Elizabeth Bay. Her room had a view with water glimpses. It was here that Madeleine and Chris finally became lovers. But in the early days of their relationship, Madeleine was not monogamous. She had other boyfriends at times but she never talked about them to Chris. He knew of one or two of them but claimed later that he was not particularly jealous. ‘It wasn't a hanging offence as far as I was concerned,' he said.
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But Chris, by his own account, was probably depressive in this period, although the condition was not diagnosed.

He was happy with Madeleine even if her moods could be ‘volcanic'.
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She could easily lose her temper and when she did, she became sarcastic. Chris recalled that throughout their relationship ‘she could freeze up; she could occasionally be violent…it was like a cloud would come down and a glitter in the eyes and you would feel this incredible bursting anger.'
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Similar comments made by many others who knew Madeleine described a pattern of inexplicable anger towards those she loved. It was as if she tested her most intimate relationships by constantly inviting rejection. Chris blamed himself for her eruptions and adopted the role of peacemaker, looking for ways to help Madeleine through the crises. One day at Billyard Avenue he gave her a Robert Graves poem, ‘Lovers in Winter', to try to calm her.

Madeleine helped support herself with babysitting jobs and she tutored her cousin Annabel Minchin in high-school maths. She was an excellent teacher and her quirky way of looking at things made the lessons a pleasure for Annabel.
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But Madeleine was constantly short of money. On one occasion, Chris gave her some funds. When Ted found out, he offered to repay the money, but Chris was insulted and refused: he and Madeleine were a couple.

Some Sundays Madeleine went with Chris to see his mother. In October 1961 Joan gave Madeleine a picture, which she hung proudly in her room at Billyard Avenue. A month later, on her twentieth birthday, Madeleine received more gifts from Joan. ‘Dear Mrs Tillam,' she wrote on 14 November, ‘The elephants have settled in and look divine and I can't tell you how much pleasure the Japanese book gives me.'
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Later, Chris could not recall the gifts but said the elephants might well have featured in a museum calendar from the British Museum or the Victoria & Albert Museum.

Madeleine was close to finishing her degree and Ted urged her not to enrol in an honours year. The St John women were encouraged by their men folk, and by the times, to set their sights low and ‘just be very nice girls with minor accomplishments and a future as wives and mothers'.
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Madeleine rebelled. She was determined to do English honours, but Ted refused to support her for the extra year. Not for the last time, Madeleine turned to Pom Jarvis, who agreed to give some financial assistance. Lic Walsh—who had shared her Mosman flat with Sylvette when Madeleine was a toddler—and her husband, Brian Alcorn, also agreed to help.
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With this money and her jobs, Madeleine would get by. Chris helped her find a cheaper place to live, in a rundown mansion called Springwood in Cameron Street, Edgecliff. It was old, romantic Sydney—terraces, little wooden cottages, gum trees, wild gardens. Madeleine loved it:

[It was] this absolutely divine old house in a part of Edgecliff that most people didn't know about then. It was on the Glebe land belonging to St James' Church…I had a room on the top floor with a bit of a verandah, French windows, the kitchen on the verandah. I had to share the bathroom. It was totally primitive and really squalid.
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To Madeleine, everything was an adventure. Even the cockroaches. Beside Springwood was a big garden of overgrown grass and jacarandas. When they were in bloom, the residents took their washing in from the line covered in blue flowers. Madeleine loved the ‘fly-by-night' grocery shops that were open late and offered only the basics. One day she asked to buy chocolate biscuits only to be told they were not stocked in the summer because the shop did not have a fridge.

Madeleine put her stamp on her own space, and Chris helped her paint the room red and hang prints on the walls. Springwood became a favourite meeting place for the Octopus girls and their friends. The English honours students sat about endlessly debating their texts and life in general. In the makeshift kitchen, which was in danger of collapsing through the verandah, Madeleine and Chris cooked elaborate meals from Elizabeth David's newly released
French Provincial Cooking
.
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In June, Madeleine and Chris went to a cocktail party to celebrate Des Moody's twenty-first birthday. The friends from St Catherine's had gone in different directions: Des was now a nurse and had already met her future husband, Peter Hunter.
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But the young women enjoyed seeing each other again and Madeleine wrote Des a warm letter of thanks. Madeleine usually hit the right note regarding matters of style. Denise Haren (later Professor Denise Bradley, the vice-chancellor of University of South Australia), who had been close to the Octopus gang, was married around this time. She recalled that Madeleine's gift was a crafted wooden salad bowl. Denise had never seen one before but Madeleine, of course, knew they were the coming thing.
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That final year at university was difficult for Chris. He struggled to cope with his father's remarriage to Elvira Nettlefold, the adopted daughter of the owner of the Tivoli Circuit, Ernest Nettlefold. Elvira had inherited a fortune when Ernest died, along with a waterfront mansion in Carrara Road, Vaucluse. Chris reluctantly agreed to Roger hosting a twenty-first birthday party for him at the house. All his friends got drunk ‘because none of us was having a good time'.
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And Roger was outraged to see Madeleine making out with one of Chris's college mates.

Chris had been involved in a long dispute with the history department over his honours thesis topic. He lost the battle to focus on American history, and, as time ran out, turned to methedrine to keep himself going as he cobbled together a thesis on an Australian subject. He handed in the document and then disappeared for two weeks, staying alone in a friend's house in Newtown, sunk in a ‘huge depression'. He recalled: ‘I eventually found my way back to life.'
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But his absence alarmed Madeleine and when he turned up again, she persuaded him to see a psychiatrist. After one session, Chris decided he did not want to talk about his problems: he wanted to concentrate on his future. He applied for a job with the Department of External Affairs but missed out. Roger came to the rescue and organised his son a job as a cadet journalist at the
Herald
. Chris began covering the courts, the morgue and the airports round, and moved into a flat at Rushcutters Bay.

In early 1963, when Madeleine graduated, she gave tickets to the ceremony to the Jarvises and the Alcorns as a thank-you for their financial support in her honours year. It was a very public signal that Ted had failed as a father. He was furious. Although he had not supported his daughter's decision to do honours at university, he paid for the professional typing of her dissertation. But Madeleine was unrepentant. Her father had not backed her study and she was not going to allow him the glory of her graduation.
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Like so many other women of her generation, Madeleine's options for a career were limited. Other Octopus members took diplomas of education and went into teaching. Marilyn Taylor scored a permanent job as an actor/presenter on the ABC radio program for children
The
Argonauts
. From her very earliest years Madeleine was tagged as the smart one, the scholar destined for success. Now real life was upon her. She had the brains and the style, but in the end she had to settle for a clerk's job in the Commonwealth Department of Education at North Sydney. She worked on
Hemisphere
, a departmental magazine that promoted the Colombo Plan—an aid scheme that sponsored Asian students to study in Australia. The job was far below her capacities. Ted St John could doubtless have pulled some strings for her, but it seems he did not.

Madeleine's work was unsatisfying, but her social life was interesting. Chris often collected her from the North Sydney offices in his blue Renault and they went to concerts at the Sydney Town Hall. They visited Pom and Os Jarvis, with Madeleine regaling them with her latest adventures. Jonette thought the couple well suited, that Madeleine's extroverted personality was nicely balanced by Chris's reserve. Pom worried that Chris was too close to his mother, although Madeleine got on famously with Joan.
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Madeleine and Joan shared a fascination with words and a distinctive visual aesthetic, and it is likely Joan felt a special bond with this well-mannered girl who, like her, had been scarred by the death of a parent. Writing much later, Chris described the women as having ‘much in common, sensibilities honed to the point of excluding most of the local quotidian, a delight in small beauties, in the juxtaposition of words and of objects'.
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Sometimes Madeleine and Chris visited Feiga and Jean, but looking back Madeleine realised she did not appreciate their sadness at the loss of Sylvette:

I did not have a clue. By the time I was 19 or 20, I was this cold-hearted, unloving, ungiving little bitch…I was trying to find a nest for myself and burrow down into it. I had no sensitivity to other people…I had no sensitivity to my grandparents. I could see they were in pain but I didn't know what to do about it. It was only later on that I realised that the only hope that they had for any type of happiness was in their children and grandchildren.
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When the young couple drove over to Clifton Gardens to have dinner with Ted and Val, Madeleine fussed over her half-brothers, Oliver and Ed, and baby Patrick, but the atmosphere was brittle. There was still great tension between father and daughter. But Madeleine had found stability with Chris. He accepted her behaviour. Spikiness was part of her nature and her sharp tongue was accompanied by a distinctive intellect that he found very attractive. He took on the role of the rock to withstand her eruptions and weather the storms.

CHAPTER EIGHT
Till Death Us Do Part

In the years after university, with her job at
Hemisphere
providing a regular income, Madeleine lived in a series of flats and houses around Elizabeth Bay and Paddington in the eastern suburbs of Sydney. Usually Chris was with her, although the couple always maintained separate rooms. Their first shared locale was at 55 Elizabeth Bay Road, in a boarding house run by Chica Lowe, the same Chica Lowe who twenty years earlier had managed the Merioola artists' colony where Madeleine had lived as a child. The Elizabeth Bay house was not as bohemian as Merioola, but Chica took in a motley crew, from men who had left their wives to teenagers who had left home. Madeleine's room was upstairs at the front. Chris set himself up in a smaller room at the back of the premises.

Around this time, they became engaged. Chris recalled: ‘I can't remember why we decided to get engaged but we did.'
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They went to Steiner's jewellery shop in Castlereagh Street and bought a ring, a floweret of bright emeralds on a gold band. The ring was second-hand but it was not cheap—Madeleine did not do cheap.

Madeleine was happy, but her pleasure was short-lived. Colette also headed for Chica's. Her friends Lyndal Moor and Yvette White were there and Chica, who remembered Colette as a baby at Merioola, had offered her a room. For Colette, it was freedom from Ted and Val.

When Colette arrived at Chica's, Madeleine felt her space invaded. She had begun to carve out a life for herself and now Colette was on her turf and was hostile:

As soon as I appeared on the scene, she would start ridiculing me or say what a terrible dress I was wearing. She would generally set me up as this person to ridicule. I became completely socially incapable; I could not participate as an equal person in any gathering as long as she was one of the people in it. I realised that I could not have a life with her, [that we] had to have separate lives. But only in Sydney you can't. You know the same people. So if we ever happened to run into each other, [if] we happened to be at the same party or whatever, she gave me a bad time.
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Madeleine assumed she had offended Colette, but did not know how. Colette was battling to find a direction. Unlike Madeleine, she did not have a clear path to university. She wanted to be a photographer, and, after she left school, had been apprenticed to a photographer. Ted and Val had bought her equipment to set up a dark room under the house, but in 1963 Colette moved into Chica's and went to work at the PMG as a telephonist.

She had a strong circle, among them, her gay American friend, Geoffrey Humphries, whose parents rented a mansion in Billyard Avenue. He spent most of his time hanging out at Chica's along with another American, Jill Roehrig, who became friends with Chris and Madeleine. Jill was fond of Chris. She recalled him as ‘a rock…a very sweet, patient man' who spent his time trying to calm Madeleine down. Jill saw several ‘enormous fights' between the couple: their relationship was difficult and Madeleine had a lot of issues.
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