Madeleine (17 page)

even in my worst period after my mother died and my father obviously found me completely repulsive and made a huge fuss of Colette and showed her off as this adorable kid…I don't think, even then, that I thought ‘it's not fair, she's got the looks and I am just this fat person that nobody loves'. I just accepted her, much more than I accepted myself.
⁸

At other times she patronised Colette and questioned her authenticity:

Colette was this little blonde girl, she was terribly fey and vague, she was like a little fairy. That was her persona. Maybe she was really like that, but that was what you had to deal with. Ted just adored it, but it got up Sylvette's nose. [Colette] was a pain in the neck, she was always going off on some trope or other and making things difficult; she liked to wind people up.
⁹

Madeleine claimed that Colette had not been able to ‘develop a proper moral sense' because Sylvette had died when she was nine. If only Colette had had the advantage of ‘my mother and I on her case together' it would have been different. Instead Colette had ‘gotten away with acting the role that suits the audience all her life. [She] was the poppet and she was going to make damn sure that she stayed a poppet.' Colette was ‘the dumb blonde—that was her role. She was clever, but the clever thing she did was to decide she was going to be the stupid one.' At close quarters in London in 1968, the St John sisters soon fell out.

Chris stayed on in New York after Madeleine left, dossing down with a friend and doing some casual film work. He planned to leave for Stanford in a few weeks. He and Madeleine were still in contact—she sent two letters, a postcard and some photos of herself in the snow in Trafalgar Square taken by Didy Harvey's husband, and wrote that she was having a good time, renewing dozens of friendships. When Chris saw the photos, he wondered if Madeleine had already found a boyfriend.

In the last week of January, Chris went back to Boston, picked up a hire car and film equipment and went on to Maine to pursue the Atget photograph. He was still committed enough to seek out the material for his wife. He spent four days in an unheated house at Moosehead Lake without finding a picture of Jean Meer Cargher's shop.
¹⁰

Back in Boston, Chris went to stay with Martha Kay, whom he had met the previous year at a party. Madeleine had not been at the party but she knew Martha slightly and had babysat her toddler son, Matthew, in Cambridge. Martha's husband had moved out and, alone with a young son in a tiny house in the poorer end of Cambridge, Martha was finding life tough. She was attracted to Chris. She too wanted to be a filmmaker, and, indeed, under her maiden name of Ansara, she would go on to have an important film career. Within days she and Chris were lovers. Martha was besotted. Madeleine was out of the picture and Martha scarcely gave her a second thought.
¹¹

The relationship escalated quickly and by February, when Chris left the east coast to drive to Stanford, it was decided that Martha and Matthew would go out to California for the summer. Madeleine and Chris were still corresponding.

Madeleine had joined a number of loose, overlapping friendship groups among the floating population of Aussies on their UK and European adventure who shared houses, boyfriends, dope and a sense that they were on the brink of huge change. Everybody survived on the smell of an oily rag, went to the same parties and moved in and out of each other's flats, turning their floors over to other people's brothers and sisters as they travelled in and out of London. There were defined subcultures. Madeleine and her crowd sniffed at the ‘Kangaroo Valley' set who flatted in Earls Court. Didy Harvey lived in Earls Court when she first arrived at Christmas 1966 but found it a relief to get over to Marble Arch.
¹²
The
Honi Soit
mob headed for South Kensington or Bloomsbury and tried to get jobs in the arts. The
Oz
editors had moved to London and were producing a UK edition of the paper from an office near Hyde Park.

Colleen Olliffe and other friends from Sydney were in London, and Madeleine became close to Christine Hill, one of three sisters who had known the St John girls in Watsons Bay in the 1940s. Madeleine was sending mixed messages to her friends about the state of her marriage. She told Christine that she was in London for six weeks and would then go back to the US.
¹³
She appeared hopeful of a reconciliation, but she did not yet know of Chris's relationship with Martha.

Around her, other expats, including Robert Hughes, Bruce Beresford and Clive James, were trying to get a start. Hughes had married Danne Emerson, and the couple were living in a huge flat in Hanover Court Gardens with their baby son, Danton. Madeleine stayed with them for several weeks, often babysitting while Danne cut a promiscuous and drug-fueled swathe through sixties London.

In London in her late twenties, Madeleine emerged from her awkwardness to become, Christine Hill thought, stunningly beautiful. ‘It was her moment. She had this very thick, dark curly red hair and she looked exotic and interesting.'
¹⁴
Madeleine certainly saw herself as a romantic figure as she wandered London with a little hat pulled down over her cascading hair.
¹⁵
She smoked heavily; a Golden Virginia roll-your-own was constantly between her fingers. And she was developing a dope habit.

At some stage in those first few weeks, Chris telephoned Madeleine and told her he was seeing Martha. Madeleine was devastated. In the spring, Martha wrote to Madeleine asking to ‘borrow' Chris for the summer. It was the sixties, when all the rules were broken, but, looking back, Martha was alarmed at her careless approach to Madeleine's feelings.
¹⁶

Martha and Matthew arrived at Stanford in mid-April and, a few weeks later, Chris began breaking the news to Joan. First, he told his mother that he had:

decided against bringing M and self home separately when I finish here at Stanford at the end of June. Coming home at this stage represents a commitment to settling down, and all that this entails, which I'm just not prepared to make. I know that sounds selfish, but it's better, I hope, to be honest about it, than to do something because others expect it of one.
¹⁷

He said he was going to go to England to ‘sort things out' with Madeleine, but that he wanted to stay in the US in the long term. He was about to start work on a documentary about the resistance to the Vietnam War draft.

Meanwhile, Madeleine moved in and out of shared houses, usually taking a single, sparsely furnished room. She hung her carefully chosen clothes from pegs on the wall, collected odd cups and saucers and invited friends to high tea served from an upturned crate that did duty as a table. Madeleine was obsessed with her weight, often eating only rice for days. Once, so weak from this diet, she collapsed on the Tube.

There was camaraderie in the Aussie ‘club'. One Christmas, a group of Madeleine's friends went to the food hall at Harrods and shoplifted the ingredients for a feast, stuffing chickens and sausages and hams under their commodious winter coats and cloaks. Madeleine was not among them, but she joined the illicit Christmas dinner. London was her place. She would come to love the seasons and the flowers, the fact that you could rent cheaply or squat in the heart of the metropolis, the access to culture, the buses, and the buzz.

Chrissie de Looze, an Australian art teacher who was part of Colleen Olliffe's circle, felt Madeleine was often wary: ‘It took Mad some time to warm up to a person, but she was also very endearing.'
¹⁸
She had presence. She could be still and observe. But she was always broke, thanks to her erratic work pattern, and her friends made concessions for her lack of money. Chrissie did a lot of listening as Madeleine pined for Chris and anguished over her lack of a boyfriend. She had met Michael Chesterman, a young Sydney lawyer who was teaching at University College. He would eventually become one of Australia's prominent legal academics and law reformers. He was handsome and charming and Madeleine fell for him. It was not much more than a one-night stand, but Madeleine was inconsolable when Michael did not pursue the matter. For months she drove her friends crazy with talk of her unrequited love. It didn't help when Michael began seeing Colleen Olliffe. He knew Madeleine was disappointed that nothing had come of the dalliance, but he was shocked in 2012 when told how obsessed Madeleine became with him.
¹⁹

At the end of 1968, a year after Madeleine's arrival in London, Chris acknowledged the marriage was over. On 18 December, he told his mother that he had written to Madeleine about going to London to see her before coming back to Australia with Martha and Matthew. Madeleine was still wearing her wedding ring and wondering what exactly Chris was up to. But she was also still infatuated with Michael Chesterman. Early in 1969, she wrote to her cousin Felicity:

I went to a party that M. Chesterman was at. I think I gave a brilliant performance—very self-assured, contained, detached & so on. Stole sideways glance at him, enough to assure me that a direct & proper look would be fatal, & talked brightly to simply everybody else, & all like that. I see I am still in love with him—absurd phrase, whatever can it mean—but the whole thing, because of the way I am & so on, lives in a realm of its own which I suppose is no bad thing—see Marvell: ‘My love is of a birth as rare/As 'tis for object strange & high/ It was begotten of despair/ Upon impossibility'.
²⁰

Madeleine told Felicity that she had not heard from Chris and did not know ‘where on earth he can be', even though she knew Chris was still on the west coast.
²¹
He was sharing a flat with others in San Francisco, having completed
Narodniks
, a documentary on draft resistance. Their contact was now intermittent, but Madeleine was happy to ask Chris for favours. In one letter, she requested a book she could not find in London, some ‘Skippy' crunchy peanut butter which was not available in the UK, and some pot. Chris laughed at Madeleine's assumptions he would run after her, but nonetheless set about filling the order.
²²

Madeleine wanted a divorce and arranged with Ted to launch proceedings in Sydney. She blamed her father for her psychological distress, but she turned to him to help her with the divorce. Chris told Joan: ‘I haven't yet heard on what grounds, or whether she is seeking alimony. We each, when we write, try to deal gently and honestly with each other, but it's very unsatisfactory as so many things on each side seem to get misinterpreted.'
²³
Chris was determined to have a life with Martha, and he continued to reassure his mother that the breakup of his marriage was rational and to some extent amicable.

In London, Madeleine was far from rational as she tried to get treatment at the Tavistock Clinic for her depression. She admitted to Felicity Baker that she was in a ‘very boggy state':

Not very brilliant at all darling. Am about to go and create Big Scene at Tavistock Clinic & Freak Out in their Foyer if we don't see some action soon. I rang them the other day. ‘Wot's Happening?' I said. ‘This won't do you know'…and they apologised and seemed to be saying that there had been a mistake or a file mislaid or something & they would fix me an appointment soon & I say it had better be. So that is the story of my life recently. In fact you see, I am not making a success of anything at all at this point, except the utterly necessary—going to work.

On my day off, the effort has utterly debilitated & exhausted me & I spend almost all of it sleeping. On Sunday, I watch clouds, if there are any, for most of the day & I think—about very little, I must add. I've written one more poem, about animals at Cambridge. It isn't finished yet. This is such a dull letter, and really I did not mean it to be. I wouldn't say that
I
am dull exactly—it's just that anything real I have to communicate now is terribly hard to sort out and write down, or even say. For a start, I am finding people very threatening & much time and spirit seems to get wasted & every issue is confused by various defensive manoeuvres. And so forth. I am really very alone; it is the only state where I can feel at all safe; and I think I have absolutely accepted a state of constant unhappiness, a perpetual garment. Anxiety and despair in any unbearable degree are precluded by the hope of therapy—I should say the whole trip is a kind of Micawberism.

I've quite given up every kind of endeavour, until, until—like a cripple sitting motionless in a chair, waiting for the crutch to be delivered. He sees the others walking about on the green with a detached envy, knowing that any attempt to rise and join them is perfectly futile till the crutch is there. The difference between my trip—I having had therapy before & knowing where it's at—and the trip of any other neurotic, is that the latter doesn't realise that his efforts to rise & walk are bound to failure; he will keep trying & the anxiety of his continual falling & failing quite exhausts him & makes him worse all the time. Of course I could go on just sitting here but it remains my ambition not merely to walk there with all the other cats but even to run and perhaps even leap up and down every now & then. So I think that's enough about that. In this state of refrigeration, to change the metaphor, thought it time for a bit of variety, I've not done/seen much lately that would provide interesting news for you…

Madeleine apologised for unburdening herself but said she was really trying to ‘say something I really mean' rather than ‘merely inventing a self for the purpose of the letter which is something I am still capable of tho' it becomes harder & is really rather despicable'.
²⁴
Almost two years earlier, she had written to Felicity from Boston, identifying Sylvette's death and Ted's subsequent treatment of her as the cause of her psychological problems. Now, she seemed to take responsibility for herself and tried hard for a more honest conversation.