Madeleine (7 page)

Valerie was a decade younger than Ted but, by the time they met, she too had spread her wings. In the mid-1950s, she had convinced her family to return to the UK and to settle there. She was teaching in London when she landed a dream job: a wealthy German industrialist hired her to accompany him and his wife to Australia by ship. Val was to teach the businessman enough English to talk to potential partners in Australia, and her payment included a return trip. Mission completed, she was on the way back to the UK on the
Iberia
when she met Ted on his way to London.

The couple sat on the deck and Ted told Val of his nightmare years with Sylvette. He claimed he had been tricked into the marriage, and Val could see he was in ‘a very bad way'. Sometimes, this man who seemed so contained wept as he recounted his wife's multiple suicide attempts. Sylvette's psychiatrist had spoken to him as if he were a monster, he said. But he wanted Val to meet his daughters. ‘They are so special,' he told her.
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Ted and Valerie left the ship in Marseilles and travelled through France, Switzerland and Italy. In Florence they chose an engagement ring; in Paris Val bought a glamorous dress; and everywhere they went Ted sought gifts for his daughters.

When the couple finally arrived in the UK, Ted rushed to a phone and told a rather startled Florence that he was engaged to be married. Over the next few weeks Ted and Val enjoyed socialising in London. The Commonwealth and Empire Law Conference opened in July amid great fanfare in Westminster Hall. This was the first of what would be regular five-yearly conferences, and the Brits turned on the ceremony with a garden party at Buckingham Palace. Ted delivered a paper on law reform and, characteristically, he went out on a limb: law reform attracted limited support in Australia at that time, but Ted was an enthusiast and argued the case strongly.
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The time in London was exhilarating. Ted had been overseas during the war, but this was different. This was England, the country his parents had always regarded as home. Even so, he convinced Val and her parents to return permanently to Australia.

Ted had seen the conference as a circuit breaker, a way to ‘distance myself from the tragedy I had been through'.
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It had been successful beyond his wildest dreams, but he had left behind in Australia two daughters still devastated by their mother's death. Aunts and uncles in Castlecrag scarcely compensated. At St Catherine's, Des Moody noted the lack of warmth and care in Madeleine's life. Des's mother, M'Liss, regularly despatched supplies of biscuits and Granny Smith apples to her only child, but Madeleine never seemed to bring back food from her Saturdays at Castlecrag. She never had much in her ‘tuck tin'.

Ted's sister Pat was busy all week teaching at a nearby school but, on Saturdays, she and Maitland were on hand to care for the girls when they were home from boarding school. In 2004, Madeleine recalled their presence with bitterness:

After my mother died, my father had the brilliant idea of getting [Pat and Maitland] to come and live with us in our house so he had an instant housekeeper, cum nanny cum cook and bottle washer and then he could fuck off and do what he liked. He often had lots of little holidays and then finally he cruised off to England…and had a wonderful time and left us in the house with…this ghoulish pair, it was like something out of Dickens.
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Colette was dismayed too. She shrank from Maitland with his badly arthritic hands and his psoriasis. ‘Dead skin came off him all the time, he smoked a stinking pipe…he was grotesque to a kid,' she recalled. Castlecrag had meant a French mother ‘who smelt good, whose linen press was a sight for sore eyes and whose domesticity had been immaculate'. Now Pat and Maitland were sleeping in Sylvette's bed and Number 9 was dominated by this bluff man who wore a tweed peaked cap and tried to ingratiate himself with his nieces by winking at all the wrong moments.
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Sylvette's death had destroyed Madeleine's world, but the years of stress leading to that death had also damaged her relationship with her father. Colette also felt Ted's emotional withdrawal. ‘He had been a doting father till we went to boarding school,' she remembered. ‘It was like the tap had been turned off. It was the end of holding and touching, it was the end of the relationship we had with our grandmother. It was the end of everything good.'
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Madeleine believed Ted was deliberately humiliating and threatening her:

He starts coming and waking me up in the night…I am now in a state of depression. He would have this routine of fifty minutes of coming to the door and barking my name at me, barks and wakes me up in a really peremptory fashion in order to get up and clean his shoes…He goes into a rage and suddenly he pulls back the bedclothes and looks down. My sister is witnessing this entire scene. He stares down at me and I get this really disgusted feeling that he is looking at something he despises…he is telling me that I am disgusting—sexually…I am not even thirteen yet.
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On some occasions when her father woke her up late at night, Madeleine recalled, he ordered her to stand in his bedroom while he enumerated her misdemeanours ‘as if from a charge sheet' read out in court.

He no longer had my mother to humiliate so he transferred the whole operation onto me…I could not open my mouth without him turning it around and ridiculing [me]. I was just this laughing stock, I was repulsive and I was this evil person…I got a feeling that my father's routine might have originated in a sexual dysfunction. I think maybe he was a man who could not perform…I would stand there, practically fainting, and he would be telling me something I had said or done, and he would go on about how disgusting and loathsome I was and I must not wake up my sister when I went back to bed and not let anyone know.
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In 2004, Madeleine speculated whether this had been the only way Ted could ‘get off'. ‘Maybe the humiliation of my mother was a sex thing and he could not fuck her till he humiliated her…' She thought that Ted transferred the humiliation to her: ‘It turned into a regular feature till he got married again.'
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Madeleine felt that Colette joined Ted in humiliating her. ‘Part of that operation was to make a great fuss of Colette and [hold] her up as this perfectly good daughter that he loved as opposed to [me].' Not that Colette escaped:

[Ted] would completely lose it because of something [Colette] had done…She would inadvertently wind him up and so I remember one time this happened and he gave her a terrible bollocking and she dissolved into a puddle. It ended up with him staring at her and [saying] ‘You are not worth a damn'.
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These incidents were as raw and painful to her as an adult as they had been fifty years earlier. They had wrought damage on Madeleine that no amount of time could repair.

Val's entry into Madeleine's life when the teenager was so vulnerable would prove debilitating for both, even though their first meeting, at Sydney Airport, when Val flew in from London in 1955, was positive. Madeleine ‘did not take her prejudice to that first meeting', Colette recalled.
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But events moved swiftly, and within a couple of months, Ted and Val were preparing for their wedding. It was common for widowers with children to remarry quickly, in part to secure a regular domestic life for their families. But Sylvette had been dead for hardly more than a year, and Madeleine and Colette had had little time to adjust.

Ted and Val married in October at St James' Church in the city, with a reception at the Australia Hotel. No one, it seems, saw anything odd in the decision to have Madeleine and Colette as flower girls. Madeleine was astounded that no adult intervened to stop it:

I can feel my stomach turning at the whole experience…To me the grossest thing in the world was for my father to remarry so quickly. Completely impossible. And if he was going to do it at all—to have this big lavish wedding and for no one to see that it should have been a quiet wedding. That I should be expected to be an attendant, and that no one concerned could see that and I had to play this out.
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Ted doubtless wanted his daughters to share in his joy, but Madeleine grew only more resentful. After the reception, she and Colette, in their pretty dresses, were driven back to boarding school—and their separate dormitories.

The newlyweds moved into Number 9. It must have been hard for the young bride, living in the house where Sylvette had died. And it must have been hard too for Madeleine and Colette to have another woman in their mother's bedroom, another woman using the same pots and pans in the kitchen.

Val made an effort to accommodate the girls' needs. Madeleine and Colette came home on Saturdays, and sometimes Val went to see them at St Catherine's on Sunday afternoons when visitors came carrying cakes in tins, to sit on rugs spread out in the school grounds for afternoon tea. She tried hard but there was always a coldness between Val and Madeleine.
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Colette recalled their relationship in the early days of the marriage:

Val didn't have too much trouble getting to me, I was open and ready for that, and Madeleine in no way was. I think she was open and ready for it up until she actually met and encountered Val face to face…Val played a huge, unwitting part in blocking [our] experience of accepting and mourning and grieving our mother.
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Ted and Val had a couple of months of married life alone at Castlecrag, but in December, when Madeleine and Colette came home for the holidays, Val began to discover what she had taken on. She had no experience as a mother,
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and to Madeleine and Colette, she failed in every way. She could not compete with the girls' memories of their stylish French mother. Sylvette was a ‘sensuous Parisian', Colette recalled, while Val's ‘sensuosity' was limited to her beauty routine of ‘cleanse, tone and nourish'. Worse, she served up burnt chops with boiled potatoes and peas. It was as if she was ‘from another planet'.
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Val scored badly on everything from her housekeeping skills to the shape of her ankles. The adult Madeleine labelled Val a ‘swot…not a party girl', and snidely noted that she did a lot of ballet but did not have a dancer's body.
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Val was no match for Madeleine's wit and unerring ability to wound. ‘Those girls were so mean [to Val]; they were vitriolic, so horrible that I felt she could not have been so bad,' Didy Harvey said.
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None of it was helped by the residents of Castlecrag taking sides with the girls. Sylvette had been exotic, and she suited the Crag, even if she was highly strung and difficult. But Val was reserved, even stiff. Ted had always been more conservative than the left-leaning artists and professionals who dominated the Crag, but now he was tagged a Tory by some, and he no longer seemed to fit in at all. ‘None of the kids liked [Val],' Didy's brother Antony recalled. ‘She was probably a very nice person but she came across as pretty cool, as did Ted.'
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Val, left to cope with her stepdaughters, was on guard. Yet she was secure in one thing: her husband's love. Ted believed his young wife could do little wrong. Florence told the adult Madeleine that Ted could not be seen to fail again at marriage after Sylvette's death and so acceded to Val's requests. ‘She [Val] sussed this out and used it to manipulate,' Madeleine said in 2004.
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She and Colette recalled their father taking Val's side against them when they argued with their stepmother. Val rarely reprimanded them, but saved their misdemeanours to recount to Ted when he got home. He would then deliver the punishment. ‘She never tried to stick up for me! I was this dogsbody and if I said something and she took exception she could not talk to me about it, but would wait and go to my father,' Madeleine recalled.
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Ted's belief in Val was reciprocated. Sylvette had mocked Ted at times and challenged his views, but Val took a different approach. She understood Ted's need for approval and an audience, and if she managed to get her own way on issues, it was rarely through a direct challenge. But managing two stepdaughters, with a new husband busy building his career in the city and with few friends nearby, was very difficult.

Colette handled the new family dynamics more easily than Madeleine did. Colette still had friends in Castlecrag, and when she was home from St Catherine's, she made herself scarce. ‘Always the flighty one,' according to Margaret Whitlam, Colette was a charmer.
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She was far more gregarious than Madeleine, whose friendships had petered out because of her absence at boarding school and because she was busy with long hours of piano practice and housework. ‘I was meant to be the kitchen maid and the laundry maid…I had this scullery maid job on a full-time basis.' But she sought refuge in books. ‘I was just too wounded and stunted to pick up relationships in Castlecrag, so I was left to my own devices really and I just read books.'
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Val had been keen to start a family quickly but soon realised that it was ‘a huge mistake' to become pregnant at a time when she was trying to build bridges with her stepdaughters. Things hadn't been too bad when the girls came home for a day or a weekend, but by the long summer holidays in December 1955, Val was suffering the morning sickness that would dog her pregnancy and things became more difficult.
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Instead of the traditional holiday at Avoca Beach, the family repaired to Jamberoo, south of Sydney. The holiday was not a success—Madeleine had no sympathy for Val:

She was a complete and total pain in the neck. She could not bear to be with us and I think it was not because she was feeling sick but because she had suddenly been confronted with what she had done—taking on these kids. She didn't know how to form a relationship with us so she would go off into her bedroom and hide away from us for the entire day.
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