Madeleine (19 page)

Life can really mash you up…But we have our Lord and our Swami Ji & each other & must believe in the healing power of Love. And in any work which is a form of Love. Jai Guru Dev! Love ever.
¹⁴

Madeleine was also looking for answers in therapy. One day in March 1971, she arrived at Regent Square, excited to announce she was being treated by a psychiatrist who followed the ideas of the radical R. D. Laing, a Scottish born medico who worked at the Tavistock Clinic in the 1950s and early 1960s where he had carried out extensive research on family relations.
¹⁵
Ted paid for Madeleine's therapy sessions.
¹⁶
He had turned to business after losing his parliamentary seat and was now making more money, thanks to the resources boom.

How much the therapy helped Madeleine is unclear, but Laingians saw mental illness as a product of social and cultural events, rather than determined by biology—something which would have allowed Madeleine to separate herself from the Sylvette narrative and to believe she was not at the mercy of her genes. In 1965, Laing had launched a controversial psychiatric community practice in London's Kingsley Hall, where patients and therapists lived together. He used techniques such as rebirthing, and he questioned the use of antipsychotic drugs, arguing that mental illness was part of a journey, which people could pass through to greater wisdom.
¹⁷

Despite Madeleine's optimism the therapy sessions did not last. Laing was a controversial practitioner and many of his followers were dismissive of convention and rules. Even so, Madeleine was surely unprepared for her therapist's suggestion that they have sex. But she agreed. In the event, the sex came to nothing when her therapist could not achieve an erection. The sessions ended. Madeleine was not particularly distressed. She pitied the doctor and said later that the incident had helped salvage her self-esteem because there was now someone she could pity more than herself.
¹⁸

Madeleine wanted to stay in London and she made attempts to find employment. She was perfecting the hand-to-mouth existence that she would endure for decades. She was still in touch with the extended St John network: her cousin Annabel Minchin was living in London in 1971. Annabel wrote to her father John, ‘I had lunch with Madeleine on Sunday. It was really superb. She is really sweet. I like her much better than I ever did before.' Madeleine introduced Annabel to Cloud, the doll she had clutched in despair in the asylum. She treated the porcelain French-style doll like a person. Annabel reported that Madeleine ‘looks like a card. She had on maroon boots, blue and white striped stockings and a long blue woollen dress with no sleeves and a jumper underneath (pale green) and a leather jerkin on top. People stare at her but she takes it in her stride.'
¹⁹
In May the following year, Madeleine sent a postcard to the Chestermans in Nairobi, where Michael was teaching. ‘I am very crazy at the present time, but it is all necessary. I can't write,' she told them.
²⁰

In June 1972, the New South Wales Supreme Court granted Madeleine's divorce and awarded her one third of Chris's inheritance. It was more than four years since she and Chris had separated, but the news may have contributed to a new low point. In September, when she wrote to Margaret Minchin, thanking her for some gifts, she sounded almost paralysed: ‘Forgive a short letter…writing has become formidable, almost impossible…'
²¹
The letter marked a significant shift. Madeleine's letters home from the US had presented a happiness that did not exist and she had concealed her growing despair behind a cheerful, contented tone. Now she made no secret of her anxieties and did not try to hide her fragile psychological state.

That openness was present when she wrote to Margaret again a few months later. Her aunt had been diagnosed with cancer, and Madeleine suggested Margaret read a book—‘there's a Pelican [edition];
alors ce n'est
pas cher—Zen Flesh, Zen Bones
.
²²
It's got these beautiful little stories in it. I'm sure it would appeal to you.' Then she turned to her own state, telling Margaret that life seemed ‘a very mysterious business to me & not at all what I expected'. She was trying to ‘sort out a lot of stuff that ought to have been sorted out sooner', but was finding that the ‘practical side of things is giving as much trouble as the other, but that too is all one'. Her life, she said, was ‘a mixture of hot & cold, with very little peaceful lukewarm between—another inevitability, at least for the time being, until one learns more'.
²³

It is not known if Madeleine was in therapy at that point. It is likely that she was sorting out her life with the help of Swami-ji and the ashram, not a professional psychologist. She told Margaret that she loved London: ‘I don't know whether Mother England is going to keep me in her bosom or not, it remains to be seen; as long as she does, I count it as a blessing—strange, grey, disorganised creature.'

She signed off: ‘Forgive me if this letter seems short. Words seem dangerous to me these days especially written down.'
²⁴

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
A Room of Her Own

Swinbrook Road in W10 is not the meanest street in London, but it is bleak and uninspiring. When Madeleine first moved there, in 1972, she told Margaret Minchin she was living in ‘a funny little house in the slums of North Kensington'.
¹
But there was nothing remotely charming about Number 6. A Castlecrag friend who visited found it ‘seedy and dark', and there was little furniture.
²
Yet Number 6 and Number 75, where Madeleine moved later, represented precious terrain for the young Australian. Her time in Swinbrook Road was not without sadness and she struggled to find a career direction. But, slowly and surely, she pieced together a life for herself and moved from despair to control.

The shift to Swinbrook Road, just a few minutes walk from Ladbroke Grove, was part of Madeleine's strategy for survival in the city she loved. She knew she would be on the breadline if she stayed in London and that she needed subsidised accommodation. Squats and shared households and council flats were part of the scene, but Madeleine proved better at working the system than some of her contemporaries. She became an expert in housing politics and subsistence living. Local councils required a tenant to live in an area for some time before qualifying for public housing, and Madeleine, intent on living close to the Portobello markets with their cheap produce, started renting Number 6 as the first step. Sometimes she was ‘signed up' for unemployment benefits; sometimes she worked in bookshops and antique shops or in clerical jobs.

In 1972 Madeleine shared Number 6 with two other ashram followers, one of them Australian Ann Herbert, renamed Miriam by Swami-ji. Miriam was working in an office and also at Cranks, the first health-food store in London. Her older sister Diana, known as Lakshmi Mata, was also a devotee.

Madeleine was not easy to live with, even for other ashram members. She was working at Collet's bookshop, but when she was at home she was reclusive, shutting herself in her bedroom with her Grateful Dead album. Sometimes she emerged to smoke and drink cups of tea in the shared kitchen. She was researching the life of Helena Blavatsky, the founder of theosophy, and Miriam was fascinated as Madeleine talked about the nineteenth-century Russian woman who had claimed to be a medium and had been widely criticised for her teachings on the occult. Madeleine leafed through a folio of photographs and cuttings and the two women went around the corner to walk past the house where Blavatsky had lived before her death in 1891.

The project added to Madeleine's exotic image at Number 6, but the residents were often forced to more pragmatic pursuits. They were impossibly short of money. They scavenged the broken vegetable crates from the nearby Golborne Road markets for firewood and picked up anything useful, including discarded food. The
kirtans
were their main social life.

Madeleine was clean and tidy to the point of being obsessive, but her moods fluctuated: she was friendly one day and cold the next. Eventually Miriam had had enough and moved out to live with Janice Dinnen, now known as Parvati, and her two young children in Ladbroke Grove.
³

Miriam and Madeleine were estranged, but Diana Herbert saw a lot of Madeleine that year. They spent the Easter weekend together, attended a
kirtan
, and meditated. On Easter Saturday night Madeleine lit a candle and put up a picture of Jesus. The next morning the women walked Swami-ji's dog, Sunrise, and Madeleine picked bluebells. In June Madeleine went with Diana to see a Betty Boop film at the Electric Cinema Club. In July Diana borrowed Madeleine's Steely Dan LP, and a few days later Madeleine went along to a party at Diana's workplace.
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It was all entirely unremarkable but the gentle rhythm of life suited Madeleine. Unlike some others at the ashram, Madeleine still smoked marijuana and spent a lot of time doing very little. Existence seemed an exhausting undertaking for the thirty-year-old.

She was being left behind by so many of her contemporaries. Clive James had arrived in London in 1962. He shared a flat with Bruce Beresford for three years and studied at Cambridge. By 1972 he was a television critic for the
Observer
, and in 1979 he published the first volume of his autobiography,
Unreliable Memoirs
. Robert Hughes had hit his straps. He, Danne and baby Danton left London in 1970 for New York, where Robert had been appointed art critic for
Time
magazine.
⁵
They were Australians shaping cultures not their own.

By rights, Madeleine should have been part of that group. Later, Clive James would regard her as the most brilliant of the expatriates in London in the 1960s. In 2006, he wrote: ‘Sometimes, when I'm reading one of the marvellous little novels of Madeleine St John, part of whose genius was for avoiding all publicity, I think the only lasting fame for any of the rest of us will reside in the fact that we once knew her.'
⁶

Madeleine was not without ambition. She had embarked on the Blavatsky book, but she struggled with the project. And she failed to find even the most lowly jobs in publishing or the arts or journalism, the kind of jobs that other expats were using as their entrée to London. She was a sharp observer, a sparkling mind, but life was a constant challenge.

She felt at home with the English but she had always dreamed of visiting her mother's birthplace and now began taking lessons to improve her schoolgirl French. It is not known when she made her first trip to France but she told her cousin Felicity Baker, who was a French scholar, that on that first trip, her brain seemed to click into gear and she spoke French readily and well.
⁷
In September 1973, she wrote to Margaret Minchin about her visit to a spa in the south of France, which she described as a ‘watering place very fashionable in Victorian times [espec.] with the British—but it is very French—lovely pastries & espadrilles in all colours eg. mauve, pistachio, gauloise bleu blue. I had a lovely time.'
⁸
Madeleine loved the country. In her novel
A Pure Clear Light
, a summer holiday in France for Flora and her children represents a time of harmony before the turmoil of her husband's affair: ‘and they had all agreed, to a tiny child, that this was the life all right, in
la Douce France
, and they were bloody
fools
not to pack it in and move down here for good.'
⁹
In conversation and letters, as in her books, Madeleine loved to sprinkle French phrases, but she often spelled them incorrectly and sometimes did not quite get the idiom right.

In December 1973, Margaret Minchin died from cancer. She was just fifty-four. Madeleine wrote to her cousin Annabel, now married and expecting her first child:

Dear little Annabel, All my love & sympathy & all God's blessings on your head. If it is of any comfort to your sadness please think of my sharing it with you; even though I'm far away in space I'm very close to you in time & my feelings are all for you; I am thinking of you all; & believing that the grace of God is as infinite as incomprehensible, I know you are safe in his care…
¹⁰

She reminded Antony, Annabel's brother, of the letter he sent her after Sylvette died:

You were my only cousin to write to me—I have always loved you for that. It was a sweet letter & as we're not children any more I have little hope of writing one to you as sweet. But I hope I may try to tell you how much I feel your loss, how much & gratefully I loved your mother, & how I am thinking of you now…
¹¹

When Sylvette was alive, Ted's sisters had not been particularly close to Madeleine and Colette. But after Sylvette's death, the St John aunts had gradually become closer to their nieces. Margaret had always been fond of Madeleine, and Madeleine's letters suggest a depth of feeling towards her aunt.

Soon there was another death to contend with. Parvati (Janice Dinnen) was killed in a freak accident that horrified the ashram members and the wider expat community in London. The young actor was on the bus home to Ladbroke Grove, riding on the back stairs as people often did, when she slipped and was thrown onto the road. She was taken to hospital badly injured, and she died a few days later. Her body was brought back to her house in Ladbroke Grove and laid out in the front room. Swami-ji led the ashram followers in chants and songs in a long vigil.
¹²

In 1976, Madeleine's London survival strategy paid off when she was granted a council house at Number 75 Swinbrook Road and given permission to sublet rooms in the terrace. She took to the role of landlady. She was expert at ‘shabby chic' long before the term was invented, scouring the streets for cast-off furniture and objects. She collected the disused and discarded and gave them a new life on her kitchen shelves or in a corner of the living room. She was increasingly happy, too, thanks to what she would undoubtedly have called an
affaire du coeur.