Madeleine (6 page)

Sylvette and Ted argued over the divorce and about who would live in the house. After a short stay at Chatswood, Sylvette moved back into Number 9, and Ted went to stay with Pat and Maitland. Sylvette was alone and worried about how she would survive without a job and without a husband. Henriette and Marcel Pile found her a job in a shop in the Chatswood area, selling home goods. She was to start in the last week in August.
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On Saturday 7 August, Madeleine and Colette were waiting for their mother to collect them from school for a day out, when Madeleine was told that she had been grounded for a misdemeanour. Sylvette eventually arrived at the school, and Madeleine was allowed to go into the driveway to talk to her for a moment. Sylvette was wearing the Dior copy, the ‘New Look' black suit that her daughter adored. Madeleine recalled:

I told her how sorry I was that I was not able to go out with her and she had these very big brown eyes and she was just looking at me and there were great big tears welling up in her eyes, and there were kids all over and I was terrified that she was going to cry—not because I minded her crying but because I didn't want the other kids to see her. [So I was] patting her arms and telling her everything was all right.
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Sylvette told the girls that Ted was going to divorce her and that she was frightened about the future. The three of them clung together, sobbing, in the St Catherine's driveway. Colette remembered:

It was horrific. We had the last interview with our mother on the driveway, in the freaking driveway of the school, late in the day, they could not or would not accommodate the visit in any other way… My mother was saying that the marriage was over, and over forever, that this was it…Madeleine was saying, ‘What are you going to do?' and my mother was saying, ‘I will be all right, I will be fine, I will just get a job in a factory or something.'
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That night, Ted responded to his wife's calls for company and went around to the house to see her. He was concerned about her fragility, but he was reassured—Sylvette did not mention suicide, which she had so often on other occasions.
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But all was not well.

Sylvette told friends she was going away to the coast for a few days before starting her job, but on Tuesday 10 August, she was still at Castlecrag.
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She telephoned Friedel Souhami and invited her over for a drink. Friedel walked down the side path from her home in The Parapet to the St John house to be greeted by a distressed Sylvette: ‘I am lonely and I wanted you to come over and keep me company.' But by the time they parted, Sylvette was calmer and Friedel did not think she was suicidal. They agreed to have lunch the following Friday.
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On Thursday night, 12 August, Sylvette again phoned Friedel to ask her to come over but Friedel was busy and declined.
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Anyway, she thought, they would see each other the next day.

Anita Date always kept an eye out for her neighbour, and on Friday morning she was concerned. The St John house was locked up and silent, and Sylvette had not surfaced. Before long, Anita was so worried that she raised the alarm.
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Ted left work and drove over. He no longer had a key to the house and had to force his way in. Anita went inside with him.

Sylvette was lying on the double bed. She had been dead for a considerable time. On the bedside table was a glass with a small amount of water in it and a spoon, but no suicide note. Ted called a doctor and Sylvette's body was taken to the city morgue.
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Across the city at St Catherine's, the boarders were getting ready for evening study when the headmistress announced that Madeleine and Colette were to go to her study. Madeleine knew instinctively what was about to unfold. ‘I knew there was no other reason that we could be summoned to the headmistress's study…she would not be going to tell us to go to her study just to tell us my mother was sick.' Miss Fitzhardinge told the girls there was ‘something very hard' that they had to contend with.
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It was a terrible moment. Over and over she said: ‘Your father loves you very much, you just have to carry on as usual.' Ted was on his way, she told them, then left the study to get them some hot milk. Madeleine began to cry. ‘I think she's dead,' Colette told her older sister.
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When Ted arrived, accompanied by his brother-in-law Bill Baker, Colette rushed into her father's arms but Madeleine held back: ‘[He] turns up, he is a block of concrete, he doesn't want to touch me, he doesn't want to know me, he doesn't even put his arms around me. He just stares at me in this totally block of concrete way.'
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Bill embraced his nieces and the men disappeared into the study with Miss Fitzhardinge, leaving Madeleine and Colette on a bench in the corridor outside. When they emerged, Ted and Bill said goodnight and left.

No one told Madeleine and Colette that their mother was dead. They had to put the pieces together for themselves. And there was no talk of the girls going home to Castlecrag, but Miss Fitzhardinge asked if they wanted to sleep in adjoining beds rather than in their separate dorms. Madeleine declined. ‘We did not want to have anything to do with each other,' she recalled. Looking back, she was scathing about Colette, who had asked Miss Fitzhardinge whether Sylvette was now in heaven. ‘I mean, pass the sick bag, Alice! It was a pure performance, it was completely bogus,' Madeleine said.
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Her bitterness was extreme but not surprising: the death of a mother would have been devastating for any child.

Bill Baker had rushed to Ted's side when he heard the news. As a clergyman, he had to enforce the church rules that barred suicides from full religious rites. He wanted to know if Sylvette had deliberately killed herself or whether it had been an accidental overdose, and he went to the morgue to investigate. The medical advice he was given was equivocal and Bill, with some relief, decided Sylvette's death was not suicide.
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Some time later, Dr Stratford Sheldon performed the autopsy and gave as the cause of death ‘poisoning by pentobarbitone'.
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Sylvette's body was released to the family and funeral arrangement were made.

The
Sydney Morning Herald
carried the death notice: ‘St John, Sylvette—August 13 1954 at her residence 9 The Rampart, Castlecrag, beloved wife of Edward Henry St John.' There was no mention of Madeleine or Colette.

At St Catherine's, Madeleine's friends knew her mother had died but there was little time for tears: ‘I was just expected to get up and proceed as usual, and some of the girls came and gave me their sympathy and condolences. But apart from that I was expected to proceed as normal, which is what I did.'
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On Monday, at 1.45 p.m., the funeral service was held at St Thomas's Church of England in North Sydney. Henriette Pile remembered it as a cold ceremony filled with an atmosphere of blame towards Sylvette.
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Neither Madeleine nor Colette attended and they were given no details of the funeral or their mother's cremation at the Northern Suburbs Crematorium. In retrospect their exclusion seems harsh, but Ted doubtless thought his daughters, aged nine and twelve, should be protected as far as possible from the tragedy.

Madeleine's cousin Antony Minchin, just eleven years old, sent her a letter of sympathy, but Madeleine and Colette had no contact with Feiga and Jean Cargher, who would have been of such comfort. It was the last week of term and the girls stayed on for the school routines of morning prayer, class, meals and prep. Over in Castlecrag, the adults whispered of suicide and the children knew something terrible had happened, but a veil of secrecy was drawn over the event. Ted wrote to Florence, who was living in London: ‘The poor girl is at peace at last.'
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Madeleine and Colette knew never to speak of it again.
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During the school holidays, the girls finally saw their Cargher grandparents. They also visited Bill Baker and his family. Years later, Madeleine claimed that, during that visit, her cousin Felicity Baker told her that Sylvette had suicided.
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For Madeleine, the question of whether or nor her mother had intended to kill herself became a defining issue. There was a lot at stake. A suicide would mean that Sylvette had abandoned her; an accidental death allowed Madeleine to believe she had not been rejected by her beloved mother.

It was some months before the inquest was held, but on 27 October Coroner Frank McNamara held a brief hearing. Constable Aubrey Goodyer went first, citing the details of 13 August when he had gone to Number 9. Ted was then sworn in. He said he had been ‘temporarily away from home' after Sylvette's discharge from Broughton Hall at the end of July. It was a potentially embarrassing situation for Ted, who was in and out of the courts on a daily basis. Now he was being interrogated about the circumstances of his wife's death. But the coroner asked only one question: ‘Any medical man ever give you notice of the cause of her condition?' Ted said he had never had a satisfactory explanation, and the coroner did not delve deeper.

The report from the government analyst noted the presence of the drugs pentobarbitone and carbromal, often used together as a sedative to induce sleep. It did not record any alcohol present in the blood. The coroner ruled Sylvette had died ‘from poisoning by pentobarbitone wilfully self-administered', but made no finding on whether her death was deliberate.
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On 24 November, the
Sydney Morning Herald
carried an extensive report detailing allegations of bad conditions in Broughton Hall and other mental hospitals in New South Wales. Among five statutory declarations from psychiatric staff was one from Dr Marie Illingworth, who had treated Sylvette just weeks before she died. She had since resigned: there was such a shortage of staff and so many new patients that she was not able to give satisfactory psychiatric treatment, she stated.
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Madeleine found the months after her mother's death very hard, and her headmistress noted her behaviour was ‘not all that might be desired'. But by October, Madeleine had pulled herself together and started working steadily again, and her scholarship was renewed for the next year, 1955. But Madeleine must be warned, Miss Fitzhardinge said, that the grant would not be renewed again if her behaviour and work were not satisfactory.

The first Christmas after Sylvette's death was always going to be difficult for Madeleine, but it began well enough with the St John clan gathering at Number 9. Madeleine played the piano brilliantly and Ted was back to his witty self. Madeleine and Colette were grieving, but the rest of the extended family, including Marion and Bill Baker, Margaret and John Minchin and Pat and Maitland Buckeridge, were more relaxed without Sylvette.
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But that Christmas Day ended in tears. Madeleine and Colette, ordered to bed by Ted, sobbed inconsolably.

The girls scarcely saw their mother's side of the family in this period. When Ted occasionally took them to the Carghers' flat, the visits were awkward. Feiga and Jean had once adored Ted, but now, mourning Sylvette, they must have been conflicted. When she looked back years later, Madeleine believed her grandparents had come to see Ted as having ‘trashed their daughter'.
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And Colette recalled that Ted ‘severed our relationship' with the Cargher family.
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When Josette wrote to Ted, inviting her nieces to come for a visit to the hotel that she and her husband managed in New Guinea, Ted told the girls he could not afford to send them. Madeleine was angry. Aunt Josette would have been a comfort.

Madeleine never saw the coroner's report on her mother's death, or any of the reports on Sylvette's psychiatric history. She knew her mother had been given ECT, but she never asked why such treatment had been deemed necessary. She spent many years constructing a story of her parents and their marriage that blamed Ted for the problems and ignored any evidence that pointed to her mother's mental illness.

CHAPTER FIVE
Flower Girls for a Stepmother

Around the middle of 1955, less than a year after Sylvette's death, Madeleine received a letter from her father. Ted was in London attending an international legal conference. He had some exciting news for his thirteen-year-old daughter—he had met a ‘wonderful woman' and planned to marry her. Madeleine and Colette were to have a stepmother: Valerie Erskine Winslow, just twenty-seven years old.

Years later Madeleine spoke of the news from Ted as ‘abominable'. She felt she was not being given time to accommodate her loss. She wrote to Ted and pleaded to be allowed to remain at boarding school. She told her father that she was very happy and wanted to remain there even when he and Valerie returned from London.
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It was a lie. Madeleine was doing well academically and had recently represented St Catherine's, playing the piano at a schools' musical festival in the Sydney Town Hall, but she was not happy. Des Moody had seen her friend become very sad after Sylvette's death, ‘not just sad in a normal mourning way, but perhaps depressed'.
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Madeleine still joined in the dormitory fun, but she was now more solitary and she suffered from mood swings. Sometimes at morning prayers, she wept silently over her prayer book. But boarding school was better than going home to a stepmother. St Catherine's was her ‘only insurance' against that pain.
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Ted readily agreed to Madeleine's request: he was focused now on Val and the prospect of happiness after a marriage that had gone so wrong.

Valerie Winslow was a pretty young woman with a neat figure and dark hair like the young Sylvette. She worked with newly arrived migrants, teaching English in the camps set up in New South Wales after the Second World War to house the many thousands of ‘new Australians' from Europe. She had been an outstanding student at North Sydney Girls High School before studying languages, including French, at Sydney University.