Madeleine (20 page)

Dave Codling was a guitarist in the original Quintessence band. His ashram name was Maha Dev, and his wife and young children were also part of the ashram group. In 1972, Dave and singer Phil Jones (Shiva Shankar) had been sacked by the bandleader Raja Ram over musical and other differences. The ruptures had distressed many in the close-knit ashram family. Phil and his wife Vidya and their two baby sons went back to Australia in search of work.
¹³

Dave and Madeleine had known each other from the
kirtans
but had not been close. They were in many ways an unlikely pair. Dave was a talented painter who had taught art before joining Quintessence, but he was not an intellectual and his Yorkshire working-class background was very different from Madeleine's privileged St John pedigree. But now his marriage was over, and he and Madeleine became lovers. Madeleine was secretive about the relationship; friends believed she loved Dave but was a little ashamed about it.
¹⁴
Madeleine told Florence Heller she had a northerner boyfriend who was not of her own social class.
¹⁵

Madeleine was a snob. She relished her entries in
Debrett's Peerage
& Baronetage
and
Burke's Peerage
and she was a pushover for a certain kind of upper-class Brit from public school.
¹⁶
Dave was hard to fit into the frame. But, in her own way, so was Madeleine. She was interesting rather than beautiful and not a typical bird for a seventies muso.

Dave never lived at Number 75 and recalled that he never saw the affair as long-term, although it lasted more than two years. He liked Madeleine enormously and was impressed by her competence and intelligence. They shared a search for meaning: ‘We had endless discussions about spiritual stuff, where we came from and where we were going…She was very funny, she could take the micky out of people.' Dave's life was still a bit of a mess after the collapse of his marriage and his Quintessence career. To him, Madeleine seemed to be ‘positive and getting on with her life. I envied her because she was so together, she had the ability to get a house together, things like that.'
¹⁷

Madeleine's affair with Dave was an affirmation of her sexual appeal and her ability to have a man of her own. Her divorce had left her feeling desolate and abandoned, and she had wasted emotion in her infatuation with Michael Chesterman, but now she found a measure of security with Dave, at least for a time.

The affair had been an on-again, off-again relationship, but Dave was shocked when it ended. One minute they were getting along famously, the next they were standing on the stairs at 75 Swinbrook Road deep in an argument that had come out of nowhere. Dave recalled, ‘We had a big bust-up and I left. That was it.'
¹⁸
Madeleine may well have brought the argument on—as she so often did when intimacy became too much for her—but she was desperately unhappy at the end of the relationship, telling friends that Dave had left her and that she was still in love with him.
¹⁹
Years later, she opened her third novel,
The Essence of the Thing
, with a rejection that comes out of the blue, as sudden as the rupture between herself and Dave.

Madeleine had long wanted a child, but when she became pregnant she had an abortion. She and Dave had just broken up and perhaps she couldn't face a child alone. Dave didn't know she was pregnant—he would find out from others some years later.
²⁰
Madeleine told Colette that Swami-ji told her to have the abortion. She was not upset when she told her sister the story, but Madeleine wrote a poignant letter to Vidya Jones noting that Dave's sister-in-law ‘had a baby boy at 4 a.m. on Thursday, Virgo/Libra cusp, very, very beautiful—you may imagine one's feelings'.
²¹
And on several occasions later in her life, she expressed regret about ‘the child she should have had'.
²²

During her time in Swinbrook Road, Madeleine met Judith McCue, an Australian studying at the London School of Economics. They were introduced by Francis James, a mutual friend who had been a defendant in the
Oz
obscenity trial in 1964. He was charged with printing the offending edition and was defended by Ted at the trial. The eccentric James hit the headlines again when he was jailed by the Chinese in 1969 as an alleged spy.
²³
When he was released in 1973, he spent extended periods in London, staying mainly at his club and treating Judith and Madeleine to meals there. But when his money ran out, he landed on his friends, including Madeleine. His war injuries and his time in jail had ruined his health and it is likely Madeleine nursed the maverick, who was old enough to be her father. Not that she seemed to mind. They were both complex personalities who loved to spar and were a match for each other.
²⁴
Madeleine and Judith soon formed a strong friendship, which endured after Judith married and moved with her astronomer husband, Edward Kibblewhite, to the US.

As she made new connections in the seventies, Madeleine lost touch with some of her old friends. She saw the Chestermans, who were back home after a year in Africa. But they were now living near the University of Warwick, where Michael was teaching, and contact was limited. At the same time, Australia was being transformed by the Whitlam Labor government, and many expats were heading home. Bruce Beresford returned to Australia in 1970 and was busy defining the national character in films such as
The Adventures of Barry McKenzie
and the classics
Don's
Party
and
Breaker Morant.

Australia was changing and Madeleine was curious. In 1976 she made her first trip home after a decade away. It is likely that Ted paid her airfare. The teenage St John boys scarcely knew their half-sister. When Madeleine arrived at Vino del Mar, taking up residence in the maid's quarters, it was as if they were meeting her for the first time. Ed, now sixteen, had just started writing record reviews for
Rolling Stone
, which was, coincidentally, co-owned and co-edited by Octopus member Jane Iliff. To Ed, Madeleine was exotic: she nonchalantly smoked dope in the kitchen and introduced him to the American rock band Little Feat, who became one of his favourites.

Madeleine rose late, drank endless cups of tea, then, draped in scarves, whiled away the afternoon inside the house, rarely venturing out till late. She maintained a glacial pace and an indifference to work. And Patrick St John, at thirteen, noted how much Madeleine upset his mother.
²⁵

Colette had returned to Sydney in 1970 and travelled around Australia. She spent a year at the radical arts space, the Yellow House, near Kings Cross. But at the end of 1974 she suffered a severe nervous breakdown and was admitted to the North Ryde psychiatric hospital. She recalled:

Suicide was always with me, it was my escape route, it was my comfort, it was my God, it was my religion. I was saving my money to go to India, everyone had been to the east. I said to myself, if things don't work out for me, there are opiates [there] and I could just die. My fantasy was to go overland to the Himalayas and just die.

She too was trying to sort out her relationship with Ted, repeatedly trying to win his approval: ‘After we both left home I ran after that man, whenever I had the guts to come back and reconnect myself with the St John family.'
²⁶

Ted was back at the bar after his stints in politics and business. He had not grown rich from his mining and property interests but had done quite well.
²⁷
Madeleine enjoyed an extended stay in Sydney, courtesy of Ted and Val. She visited the family's weekender in the high country at Mt Elliot just inland from Avoca Beach. Ted and Val had bought the old corrugated iron and timber farmhouse on a few acres in 1967. Ted loved the bush and it was a haven, especially for Oliver, who could roam freely and safely over the property. By the time Madeleine saw it in the seventies, Mt Elliot had become the centre of family gatherings for the extended St John clan.

In Sydney, Madeleine telephoned Chris and reminded him he still owed her money from the divorce settlement. ‘Send me an invoice,' he told her. ‘I don't do bills,' she retorted.
²⁸
The wounds of their marriage were still raw.

Madeleine was not tempted to remain in Australia. She and Chris had left Sydney as bright young things, but their dreams had collapsed in Boston, and Madeleine scaled back her expectations. In London she had created a space of her own. Her life, no matter how reduced, was in London, not Sydney. She thought of Australia as ‘an accident of birth rather than as her homeland'. She had been ‘brought up on the idea that England was where I came from, in a deep sense where I belonged. Australia was a deviation of one's essence.'
²⁹

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Madame Blavatsky

The decade or so that Madeleine spent at Number 75 Swinbrook Road was dominated by efforts to research and write a biography of Helena Blavatsky. The project dragged on and on, becoming a metaphor for Madeleine's own lack of direction. It was Madeleine's excuse for not pursuing an orthodox career. Ted held the Blavatsky biography up to his sons as an example of Madeleine's inability to complete projects, and he warned them against following in her footsteps.

No one is sure why Madeleine chose to write about the extraordinary Russian woman who moved from dabbling in the occult, holding séances in Cairo, to founding the Theosophical Society in 1875. One reason may have been that the fusion of the east and west inherent in theosophy matched Madeleine's interest in both eastern religion and Christianity. But perhaps Madeleine was simply intrigued by this controversial woman, who had a complicated childhood. The facts of Blavatsky's early life are scant but it is known she was only eleven when her mother died. Madeleine may have been drawn to explore a life she saw as parallel to her own.

Quite how long Madeleine worked on Blavatsky is unclear, but she talked about it to Miriam Herbert as early as 1972, told people in 1980 that it was finished, rewrote it and announced it finally finished in 1987, and was still trying to get it published in the early 1990s. The project defined her middle-age. The material was complicated but Madeleine embraced the act of writing. It was through Blavatsky that she became convinced that it was her role in life to be a writer. She began to see writing almost as a calling, reporting to Vidya Jones in Australia:

I must tell you that there is nothing I know more destructive of the dreaded ego [than writing]. I really believe that to be fully engaged on a creative endeavour is a righteous spiritual path…
¹

Madeleine supported herself in this period with a succession of small jobs, as well as rent from subletting rooms at Number 75. She also signed up for unemployment benefits. There was money from the divorce settlement, although she had to wait for some time for the funds to come through. It is not clear how much money, if any, Ted sent to her in these years, but in 1980 he paid for her to travel to Australia again. He had taken a number of high-profile, but not lucrative, legal cases, but thanks to his earlier success in business, he and Val were more comfortably off than they had been earlier in their marriage. Val was not in paid work, but she spent a lot of time involved in fundraising and supporting Inala, a Rudolf Steiner–based institution for the disabled in Sydney's northern suburbs, where Oliver lived.

Madeleine's leisurely lifestyle and failure to get a ‘real job' in London worried her father and stepmother, but their frustration increased when Madeleine visited Sydney and they saw her operating at close quarters. She was brittle and ready to take offence. Feiga, who had moved to Adelaide to live with Josette and her family, was terminally ill with lung cancer, and no one, it seems, had told Madeleine. When she found out, she was incensed, convinced her family was treating her with disrespect.
²
Madeleine visited Feiga just before she died on 26 April. Back in Sydney, she wrote to Judith McCue to say she was ‘having a perfectly awful time'. She said of her grandmother's death:

I would like it to be known (!)—the family is ignoring this fact studiously—that I am very disturbed & freaked out, one way & another & can handle nothing, let alone all the junk I seem to be attracting. This evening am working on trying to see the ludicrous side—as a means of surviving—&, so far, failing…We'll have to trust in a benevolent Deity—what else do we have?
³

Madeleine was undoubtedly grieving for Feiga, but she was self-absorbed and could interpret the event and the reactions of her family only as an assault on her well being.

Val and Ted had planned a family holiday with Ed and Patrick to a beach resort in Fiji. It was to be a celebration of the end of Ted's work on the high-profile Barton case, in which he successfully defended the business magnate Alexander Barton and his son Thomas on corporate charges. But Ted was again busy in the Supreme Court, pursuing action against the Chelmsford Private Hospital in Sydney over the notorious deep-sleep therapy used on depressed patients in the 1970s. Ted had taken the case
pro bono
. The hearings continued for months, and Ted could not go to Fiji with the family. Val invited Madeleine in his place.

At the resort, Ed and Patrick enjoyed themselves windsurfing and drinking beers. They rather liked their half-sister, but the holiday was a strain for Val. Madeleine stayed in bed till noon then emerged swathed in layers of clothing to protect her fair skin and retreated to read a book under a palm tree. There was so much history between the two women that every conversation was a minefield. One day, seeing a family on the beach with an adopted Vietnamese child, Val remarked that she and Ted had thought of adopting but had decided they could not give a child enough access to his or her own culture. Madeleine was angry. ‘Fuck you, you bitch,' she thought. ‘How can you say that to me, who you prevented from doing French honours, who you never encouraged to have anything to do with French language, or people, or anything.'
⁴
Madeleine always considered her mother to be French. Indeed, she believed at this stage that her grandfather, Jean Meer Cargher, was French—she discovered only towards the end of her life that both Jean and Feiga were born in Romania.