Madeleine (16 page)

Three weeks later Felicity arrived. Madeleine was low in spirits. The cousins and Chris walked around Harvard Yard, Madeleine clinging like a limpet to her husband. At home the Tillams entwined on the sofa, reading the newspapers. Madeleine could scarcely operate without Chris and did not venture out alone. She was miserable. Felicity thought that Chris was angelic towards her and that the couple seemed very loving. But the therapy was having little effect and Madeleine's mood plummeted. She was often tearful and leaned constantly against Chris, almost ‘piggy backing' on her husband.
²⁹

Madeleine found Felicity's visit intense. ‘Oh what a weekend,' she wrote to Joan. ‘[Felicity] talks a lot & has a lot of problems & some rather inflexible opinions. I must say tho' that she is far prettier at 27 than she was at 22.'
³⁰
Once again, she managed to sound quite cheerful on the page, yet a week earlier she had seemed in a state of near-collapse. The real Madeleine was hiding between the lines.

Chris was busy, travelling down and back to New York for work, but he managed to pop into La Cuisiniere, an upmarket cookery shop on Madison Avenue, to buy a decorative ladle for Madeleine.
³¹
He knew how much his wife loved beautiful objects and, even at this stressful time, he found moments to seek them out for her. It was now settled that after Christmas he would head back to Stanford to finalise his degree by making a film about managing difficult children in the classroom. There was only one problem: Madeleine did not want to go back to California.

The Tillams were at a critical point in their marriage, yet they did not confront this directly. Instead they came up with a plan that, on the surface, was about travel, not separation. In a letter in October, Chris told Joan that they were:

seriously thinking of packing M off to London for the three months: we are so near, and may never for a long time be nearer; it would (hopefully) be fairly easy to get a job…But what a wrench—we have circled round the notion and said ‘yes, that's what we'll do' but the feeling in my bones at least is that the die still has to be cast.
³²

Years later, Chris recalled the London trip as Madeleine's idea, one based on her desire to see the city and to see Colette.
³³

Madeleine had scarcely written to her mother-in-law from Boston—an indication of the strain she was under. Now she too wrote to Joan. She made no mention of the London trip but the letter was chatty. Madeleine and Chris had taken a trip to Rockport on the Massachusetts coast, which was ‘pretty & strange & lost & lorn looking,' she told Joan. ‘There is something chilling about it.' Chris had recently bought her a thick white china pot from their favourite junk shop in Cambridge, and she included a sketch of it for Joan. She had visited the Boston Museum and decided the Renoirs ‘are so badly hung that…it's still not possible to look at them comfortably'. There was baseball fever with the Boston Red Sox fighting it out with the St Louis Cardinals, and Madeleine reported that she was interested ‘in spite of myself'. She was reading
Persuasion
aloud to Chris who was, instead, ‘mad about Stendhal at the moment, having just read
Scarlet & Black
'. She passed on some gossip about Sidney Nolan's penchant for dashing off paintings. And Chris, she wrote, was:

really the funniest person in town. While the rest of us strain he quietly comes out with one perfect & enormous joke. I'm sure this kind of dead-on sense of humour is another thing which is very necessary for making good films, wouldn't you say so?
³⁴

Madeleine was an accomplished performer by now, managing to conjure a picture of domestic harmony and stimulating intellectual life that was only half the story.

She was deeply frustrated by her lack of creative outlets, and she and Chris began to plan a film based on her grandfather, Jean Meer Cargher. Madeleine had found a book of photographs by French photographer Eugène Atget, which included pictures of little shops in Paris. She wondered if the Atget might have taken a photograph of the Cargher shop. Part of his collection was held in Maine by American photographer Berenice Abbott, who had worked in Paris in the 1920s and been close to Atget. So Chris and Madeleine drove north to investigate. They stayed overnight at a motel on the coast, but Chris went on alone to contact Abbott. He did not see the collection, but back in Cambridge, inspired by the Atget pictures, Madeleine wrote a short monologue about Paris—a city she had never seen—and Chris filmed her reciting it, noting that there was a beautiful rhythm in this homage to her grandfather.
³⁵

Back in Australia in 1967, Ted St John was about to become a household name. He was determined to make a difference as an MP, even from the backbench. His maiden speech on 16 May is one of the most famous in Australian political history. Ted called his own leader, Liberal prime minister Harold Holt, to account for failing to hold a second inquiry into the controversial HMAS
Voyager
incident.

During exercises on 10 February 1964, the Navy destroyer,
Voyager
, had collided with the aircraft carrier HMAS
Melbourne
, killing eighty-two crew of the
Voyager
including the captain, Duncan Stevens. Ted believed the royal commission, which criticised the
Melbourne
captain John Robertson, had been a whitewash of Stevens. Ted was among several politicians, journalists and members of the public who agitated for further investigation. Robertson resigned ‘in disgust' after the royal commission reported that while the
Voyager
was responsible, it could not say who was to blame.
³⁶
Ted was convinced that Stevens had a history of drinking, and he played a crucial role in forcing the second inquiry when he outlined the evidence in his maiden speech. It was extraordinary for a new MP to use a maiden speech to attack his own party. Career suicide. But Ted also directly embarrassed the prime minister when Holt interjected—also unheard of during a maiden speech—and Ted ticked him off. The second royal commission, which reported in February 1968, found that Stevens had been medically unfit for command, and Robertson was paid $60,000 in lieu of a pension.
³⁷

Ted had angered a lot of people in the party and he was becoming increasingly isolated in Canberra. He was uncompromising and fearless when his mind was made up, and he had supreme confidence in his own moral rectitude:

I really wasn't so much concerned with self-advancement…my chief concern basically was to form my own views. I rather foolishly thought that I could and should exercise my own independent judgment and I don't regret having done so, but I mean, with the wisdom of hindsight, I could see it just wasn't on…
³⁸

In May 1967, when her father made his infamous speech, Madeleine was absorbed in her own problems. Just after Christmas, Chris told his mother that he and Madeleine would be separated for six months, till he finished his course at Stanford in June ‘and then we'll come home. By what route and to what work…and even for how many years, who can tell.'
³⁹
Madeleine was going to London. She would fly out a week later. Chris knew his mother needed an explanation:

because we are obviously very much in love and happy: why not stick to the very good thing? Well, it's not easy to explain but we both, for different reasons, want to be on our own for a while. M because she sees herself as too dependent—discontented with herself, not with being married or me—she wants to try living without a ‘total protector'. I think she is ready to do this and will prow through… Her psychotherapy has helped tremendously and even has made her able to sense the tremendous possibilities she has…
⁴⁰

Chris saw the separation as a fresh start and believed that he too could gain from being less dependent on Madeleine. ‘I hope there's a really productive period starting & you shan't see me for smoke,' he told Joan.

I want to devote total time and energy to work for a while, and M thinks I need to as well. The point is, we both think it will do us good to break up the present way we live our joint life: too much dependence. But, oh, how we love each other: you mustn't fear that things are wrong, or that we won't be together again in six months' time.
⁴¹

Chris told Joan that they were sad to break up the household at Agassiz Street, but they had itchy feet and a ‘real sense of wider horizons'. He understood what the separation looked like to outsiders and he asked Joan to be discreet: ‘Would rather things about M & I were paraphrased by you as you think best—but the letter is really private.' And he asked his mother to sell the Nolan painting she had given him as a wedding present. He needed the money.

Meanwhile, Madeleine was focused on a special project. She made a book with a blue cardboard cover, grey paper and hand-sewn binding to send home to Joan. It contained the photographs of the couple's life in the US, at Menlo Park, San Francisco and Cambridge. She was making her mother-in-law the custodian of the years she shared with Chris. In 2012, he recalled that ‘at the time there was a sense of, why are we tearing up all these records of our marriage and sending them home? Why are we not keeping them?'
⁴²
Chris had reassured Joan that they would be together again in six months, but it seems he was already wondering whether Madeleine had another agenda.

The news of a separation must have worried Joan. She had never seen Madeleine behaving badly: ‘We would not have wanted her to see that.'
⁴³
And in 1967, when Chris wrote to his mother about Madeleine's departure for London, he continued to shield her from those details of their life.

Soon it was time to leave. Madeleine and Chris had recently moved their bed into the sitting room so they could ‘wake up with the snow'.
⁴⁴
At 8 a.m. one day, the men from the second-hand furniture shop arrived to take out the chest, the table and other pieces they had sold. Madeleine slept on—whether through exhaustion or denial that her American sojourn was over—and woke up to an empty room.
⁴⁵
Agassiz Street was no more.

The next day, the Tillams flew to New York. Madeleine went to Bergdorf's and spent a hectic hour buying up with her travel money. Then she and Chris met friends for dinner at the Algonquin Hotel. It was ‘quiet, sedate, red plush, New Yorker staffers; redolent of Robert Benchley and D. Parker', Chris wrote to Joan.
⁴⁶
Then suddenly it was time to take the shuttle to Kennedy.

It was snowing and there were no taxis. Madeleine and Chris ran four blocks to the Pan Am Building, took the lift fifty floors to the helipad and bought helicopter tickets. They circled the Empire State Building, and pressed their noses to the window to see a receding Manhattan. Ten minutes later they landed at the international airport. Twenty minutes later, Chris waved his wife goodbye.

The next day, 6 January 1968, Madeleine sent a cable to Chris from London. She had arrived.

CHAPTER ELEVEN
An Expat in London

In the 1960s, London became the destination for a generation of young people determined to break from the past—and their country. Madeleine's friends were all ‘desperately seeking something other than Australia'.
¹
For the Octopus girls and the
Honi Soit
crowd, Australia ‘was a lost cause, sunk in banality, Catholicism, censorship. Life began when you got to London.'
²
In those years, the Australian diaspora in London included people such as Clive James, Germaine Greer, Peter Porter, Barry Humphries, Bruce Beresford, Robert Hughes and Richard Neville.

They were the stars among the thousands who washed up in the capital. Many travelled for a year or two; others for much longer; some never came home. But the era produced a remarkably clever batch of expats whose experience of London was shaped by a time when travel was still relatively expensive and when telephoning home was a rarity. Once away, they stayed on for years, seeking a new community in their adopted country.

Madeleine was looking for a fresh start. That first day, she made her way, as agreed, to Colette's shared flat in Upper Berkeley Street, near Marble Arch. There were several Australians in the building; friends had joined friends as rooms became available. Tonia Date was there, so too was Didy Harvey with her new American husband, film student Daniels McLean. Richard Wherrett shared the basement flat with Jim Anderson (who would go on to edit
Oz
magazine in London with Richard Neville), the theatre director Philip Hedley and Colette.

Colette was excited about seeing Madeleine after two and a half years. She gave her older sister her bedroom and her warm quilt and slept on a couch in the boiler room.
³
Madeleine did not mention Chris joining her, or her suspicions of an affair, but Colette was in little doubt Madeleine had left Chris and that the marriage was over. She blamed Madeleine for the couple's marital problems: ‘I could only imagine that she must have done a number on him as I had seen her do on others…I could not spend two weeks with her and I could not imagine how any guy could live with her.'
⁴
Even so, Colette urged a reconciliation. She liked Chris.

Madeleine found work at Collet's London Bookstore in Charing Cross Road and met some new friends through the Upper Berkeley Street crowd. Tonia Date had a new French boyfriend, Daniel Le Maire. He flirted happily with Madeleine and teased her about trying to be more English than the English, even to the extent of adopting the upper class British habit of adoring anything vaguely French. They danced together at parties, and Daniel was struck by Madeleine's physical fragility, and her sadness.
⁵

The St John sisters had long had a fractious relationship. Within days of Madeleine's arrival, they argued. ‘She just had this talent for alienating people and it didn't matter what you did. That's what she did with relationships, she was terrified of intimacy,' Colette recalled.
⁶
Madeleine, in turn, blamed Colette for their arguments.
⁷
Some friends in London thought Madeleine was jealous of her younger sister. But Madeleine insisted that: