Madeleine (32 page)

2. The only persons whom I know to have done so are Edward in his
SMH
article & subsequently by collaborating with the author of the
HQ
article, and yourself.

3. It follows from 1. that I have never described you to a member of the press (or to anyone else for that matter) as ‘the stepmother from hell'; is this quote from the
HQ
article? I'm afraid I haven't the stomach to look that out even once more—it has given me enough distress already.

4. And that none of the statements, feelings, attitudes or etc etc etc imputed to me concerning the family in that 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.

On it went, with Madeleine outlining her position and then accusing Val of being still in possession of:

i. A remarkable proportion of my letters;

ii. My turquoise & seed pearl locket which my father nicked from me & gave to you shortly after your marriage.

Madeleine gave no quarter:

Let's just say that you and I live on 2 different planets, that we always have done & that it's just one of those mad accidents of fate (fatal accidents of madness) that we should ever have had any connection…as for your understanding where I'm coming from—or vice versa—not a hope. What you have done may be perfectly okay on your planet: on mine, it is completely out of order. And that goes double for the allusion to my mother and the alleged nature of her death. Inexcusable.
²⁰

Madeleine was angry beyond all reason, and she was determined to destroy any chance of a reconciliation with Val. The letter detailed old hurts. The claim that Ted had taken from her a piece of jewellery to give to Val refers to a locket that had been given to Madeleine by Ted's sister Pam. The circumstances are unclear, but it is likely it was a St John heirloom of sorts. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the event, Madeleine could not let it go even fifty years later. Val had become the focus of all her bitterness.

Madeleine was now confined to her flat. Susannah saw her regularly but Madeleine also had a succession of paid carers subsidised by public agencies. She found the helpers variously irritating.
²¹
One ruined a cashmere jumper by putting it through the washing machine and Madeleine found it hard to forgive the mistake. Towards the end of 2003, Peta Worth, a young Australian woman on a working holiday in Europe, was given the job through the agency, Care UK. Peta went to Colville Gardens every Tuesday about lunchtime. She vacuumed, cleaned the bathroom and lavatory and kitchen and went down to Portobello Road to shop and pay bills.
²²
Peta found Madeleine eccentric, but a keen listener. She talked about her main job as the nanny to twin boys who lived not far away. ‘She lived a lot through what I was doing,' Peta recalled. Madeleine spoke often of Paris, and Peta thought her ‘very French'—she had lovely cotton lace nighties and French provincial furniture.

Madeleine was frustrated by her illness and talked a lot about the past. She had no regrets about leaving Australia, but she displayed some affection for the place. She survived on crackers and tomatoes and fruit, and occasionally Peta bought sardines from a Spanish shop on the Portobello Road and French bread. Peta had been in London since 1998, working for a few months at a time and then travelling in Europe. True to form, Madeleine gave her plenty of advice about where she should go and urged her to keep travelling.

One day, at Madeleine's request, Peta took pictures of Madeleine's new cat, Tiger Lily. Unlike her predecessor Puck, Tiger Lily was not very fierce and she slept a great deal of the time. Madeleine was concerned at her advanced age and worried she might die. She was ‘very much her own cat', but she did allow you to pat her, now and then, Peta recalled.
²³

Towards the end of 2003, Madeleine had a long stay in hospital and friends worried that she would not recover. Once again, however, she was hypercritical of their efforts to help. Sarah and Felicity sent a hamper to the hospital, but Madeleine reacted angrily at what she felt was a waste. She loathed being pitied and was very alert to any hint of this in her friends' behaviour.
²⁴

That spell in hospital was truly terrible. ‘So ill,' she told Antony Minchin in a letter sometime later. ‘They give you steroids which have the most awful side effects even if they do keep you alive.'
²⁵
She was trying to live long enough to finish her book.

Around the end of 2003, Madeleine broke off the long friendship with Sarah and also ended her contract with Lutyens & Rubinstein. Sarah found it ‘very, very painful' and, like so many others in the past, she never really knew why Madeleine had dropped her. Sarah suspected it was something minor, like breaking an arrangement to visit or telephone. The rupture was classic Madeleine—a sudden rejection that was unexplained and irrational. Now Susannah Godman was Madeleine's last link with the agency. Sarah and Felicity were relieved that at least they could keep an eye on their former client through Susannah's daily visits.
²⁶

On 5 March, Madeleine asked Peta and Susannah to witness her will. She owned no property but she had about £25,000 to distribute. Bruce Beresford was to be her literary executor and Robert and Kathy Tooley her executors. They were happy to oblige the friend they had met in Greece a few years before. The will specified that her body be made available for ‘therapeutic purposes (including corneal grafting and organ transplantation)' but not for medical education or research. Her estate was split between the Woodland Trust, a UK-based conservation charity, and the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. And she left her jewellery to her cousin Nicole Richardson.

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 really 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…
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