Madeleine (21 page)

On her 1980 trip to Australia, Madeleine also spent time with Vidya Jones and her sister Christine Hill. Christine was married to another ashram follower, Ralph Magid, an exuberant member of a well-known Melbourne Jewish family. The couple had returned to Australia and opened a bookshop in the outer Melbourne suburb of Mulgrave. At Mulgravia, as the group called it, Ralph and Christine were optimistic about their business and Vidya, separated from her husband Phil and with two little boys to rear, had moved to Melbourne to help them run the shop. The three of them welcomed Madeleine and the visit went well. Madeleine felt she was with her real family. She excelled herself with her ‘party pieces' about far-from-glamorous Mulgrave, performing skits on ‘the topography & Climate of Mulgravia' and ‘the True Inwardness of a Modern Australian Shopping Complex'. In Mulgrave she felt she had space to ‘talk'. Later, back in England, she wrote to Vidya about how much she missed:

all the fun of being with youse & always will…Vidya my sweet it really is very very heartwarming to me to have your love & friendship & your dear relations as, let's face it, I really have no other ‘family'. So I hope you lot never cast me out not that you would…
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The fear of being abandoned was never far from Madeleine's mind.

Madeleine met up with her old university and London friend Winton Higgins in Sydney—but only after they met by accident on a bus. They had lost touch in the seventies. Winton recalled that Madeleine seemed to be happy with the direction of her life.
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The lives of those who had met through SUDS and
Honi Soit
had changed considerably in the last two decades. Many of the Octopus women were divorced or separated from their first partners; some had found their hopes of careers interrupted by children at a time when child care was hard to find; some had put aside their dreams. Suicide had touched them. One of the group, Helen Goldstein, haunted by depression, had died in her twenties after several suicide attempts. Tragedy struck another of their contemporaries when Diane Horler, sister of the theatre director Ken Horler, died after an illegal abortion.
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In June 1980, Chris's mother died. Madeleine had continued to write to Joan long after her divorce from Chris and it is likely they remained in touch until she died. It was another break with the past: Joan had been Madeleine's only link with Chris and her only source of any news about his life in Australia with Martha. Over time, Madeleine would create a new narrative about her American years. Her London friends would be told only that she had been married for a brief time. Few people knew the name of her former husband, or any other details. Madeleine held tight to her belief that Chris had had an affair, but he faded from her story.

Not so Sylvette. In Australia, Madeleine salvaged several photographs of her mother from the boxes of pictures that Ted had kept. She was convinced her father wanted to cut Sylvette from the family record. She believed Ted had enforced a silence after her mother's death and that taking possession of the photographs was a way to reclaim that past. In the end it was Madeleine who excised her mother from the family collection, but she felt she had ‘rescued' Sylvette.
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Back in London in the middle of 1980, Madeleine was flush with funds after receiving part of the divorce settlement. Madeleine knew Chris needed the money and some of her friends chided her for taking it, but she was unperturbed. She considered it rightfully hers. She used the money to go to court and get rid of a difficult tenant, and then splurged on several pairs of expensive Charles Jourdan designer shoes.
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In November she wrote to Vidya: ‘I am not doing anything very responsible let alone difficult, until the money's gone. I'm just doing a bit of this, a bit of that & it is, of course, rather nice.'
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Her bond with Vidya was strong. When Vidya went through a difficult period, Madeleine wrote to say she felt:

powerless to offer any practical assistance…At this distance there are only words: & who needs those, especially mine. So I am just thinking of you sorrowfully in a void. So I beg you to write even a few words just as soon as ever you can & tell me how you are, exactly. The veil of myah (the darkness of the universe) gets thicker by the minute, one seeks ever the enormous joke at the bottom of the pile. So to speak. ‘Some laugh, some weep some dance for joy.'
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The letter was tender and honest. Madeleine understood now, at some deep level, that human existence was fundamentally absurd. Her emotional security, imperfect as it was, was linked to Number 75, where she was in control. Back in London after a few years away, Miriam was relieved to find Madeleine had a room for rent. Both women were still attending the ashram
kirtans
and Miriam, who had retrained as a nurse and was working at the Royal Masonic Hospital, was happy to give Madeleine another chance. Miriam paid twelve pounds a week for a room at the front of the house; Madeleine had the beautiful large space on the mezzanine with deep windows, over which she had grown a geranium creeper; and another lodger, John Simmonds, a British cameraman, lived on the top floor.

Miriam described the house as set up ‘like a museum' with Madeleine's second-hand goods given pride of place. Madeleine had an old Elizabeth David cookbook and French cookware bought at the markets and she imbued the objects with a value only she could see. Her cat, Darling Point, named after the Sydney suburb, ate everything from boiled eggs to bread and butter.
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Madeleine doted on her cat. She wrote to Vidya: ‘The puss is, as ever, the ever-sweet Darling precious.'
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Initially, Miriam was happy at Number 75. ‘Madeleine has been ever so sweet to me and in 2 weeks I'll have a good (bigger) room here. I really feel at home back here in Swinbrook Road,' she wrote to her brother, Tim.
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But Madeleine proved to be tricky. She had always been quick to judge and before long Miriam found her overly critical and set in her ways and her ideas. She was still using a lot of dope, despite Swami-ji's entreaties to his followers to stay away from drugs, and now had a smoker's cough.

In December that year, nineteen-year-old Tim, backpacking his way around Europe, came to stay with his older sister at Swinbrook Road for a short time. It was the first time he had met Madeleine. She was welcoming, but Tim quickly realised that he must not cross her. He remembered her as a control freak, crusty and ‘snooty' at times. She was ‘vivid, brittle, contrary, but never an ingénue'. Tim thought she was very observant, that she was always mentally taking notes. Madeleine invited Tim to her room and instructed him in the virtues of Schubert chamber music and its superiority to his symphonies. On New Year's Day, Tim and Miriam went to a
kirtan
at Islington. Tim recalled that everyone had waited for Swami-ji to arrive ‘like the Messiah'. Madeleine did not attend, but when Miriam and Tim returned she asked: ‘So, what was the message of the day?' Though still connected to the ashram, she had perhaps grown a little cynical.

When Tim decided to leave freezing London and chase the sun to Greece, Madeleine asked him to bring back some duty-free Bisquit cognac. She may have been down-at-heel, but she knew quality. Tim recalled that ‘she was giving me a life lesson, she seemed like a woman of the world'.
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When he came back a few months later, Madeleine was a little less welcoming, although she sometimes included him when friends came round for long talking and smoking sessions in her room. As the dope kicked in, Madeleine relaxed. ‘She was quite brassy, quite open about sex and sexuality,' Tim recalled.
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One day, a thin, long-haired man who lived close by drove Madeleine and Tim out of London to see horse chestnut trees in bloom. Madeleine insisted they were her favourite English tree and said Tim simply must see them. She produced a spliff and they started smoking. It was quite a trip, Madeleine, with her ‘pinched, nervous' face, looking back from the front seat and gently mocking the young Australian as they rocketed, stoned, through the English countryside.
¹⁷

By mid-1981, Miriam was again fed up with Madeleine. Tim had dropped in for a few days after travelling in Egypt and the visit had not gone over well with Madeleine. Miriam wrote to her parents in Sydney that she was looking for somewhere else to live:

Being near Madeleine has become too heavy. She is always finding fault and accused both Tim and me of being ungrateful, taking things for granted etc. I don't know what she expects—flowers from Harrods or should we kiss her feet. She has a neurosis, where she needs to find fault continually. She has been lucky to have me around who minds my own business, is tidy, unobtrusive + coughs up the rent punctually. She always wants to play the landlady—she can't have things on an equal basis. As far as I can see the best thing for me is to find somewhere else where I can feel part of the household and have some friendly, open-minded people about, not one who is locked in her own head and can't (won't) get out.
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In August, Miriam left the household.

Unemployment in the UK was high, and Madeleine struggled to find even a part-time job. In many ways, she seemed to her friends to be living the life of a student. When Peter Grose and his wife, Roslyn Owen, bumped into Madeleine in the street near the Portobello markets one day, she invited them around for a meal. Peter, who had been part of the
Honi
Soit
set, was now a literary agent, and Roslyn, who knew Madeleine from their school days at Queenwood, worked on a newspaper in Fleet Street. They were delighted to see Madeleine after almost twenty years, but were surprised when they were expected to sit on the floor at Swinbrook Road, eat spaghetti bolognaise and listen to a heavy metal band.
¹⁹

When Ed St John visited his half-sister, he found Number 75 unprepossessing rather than charming. In Australia, brazenly smoking dope at Vino del Mar, Madeleine had seemed sophisticated. In a sparsely furnished house off the Portobello Road, the image was a little harder to sustain.
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CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Colville Gardens

Madeleine was delighted when Number 75 Swinbrook Road was demolished in the early 1980s and she was rehoused in a larger block of mansion flats at 55 Colville Gardens, Notting Hill. Colville Gardens was several steps up from Swinbrook Road, and her new home had a beautiful outlook across an open square to the spare and elegant All Saints Church. From her spacious flat on the fourth and fifth floors, Madeleine looked through trees to the belltower. The light was lovely, the air seemed fresh, and she had a home all her own, free of other tenants, in the heart of one of the world's great cities.

Her mansion block had been built in the mid-1800s as part of a large development centred on All Saints. The construction was funded by a wealthy vicar with a social conscience, but he ran out of money before the project was completed and the church was derelict for years. It became known as All Sinners in the Mud, because it had a disreputable congregation and was surrounded by half-built houses on farmland. The church was eventually completed in 1861, and property speculators continued to build houses in the area. Notting Hill was a new London address for upwardly mobile Victorians. But over the years, it became less appealing. The houses were too grand for city workers, but too small for the rich folk who preferred the more fashionable Kensington.
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Between the first and second world wars, the area became more decrepit and it was not until the 1960s and 1970s that the Notting Hill Housing Trust began to improve conditions. In 1999, Madeleine wrote about those earlier decades when Notting Hill was home to:

long-exploited Afro-Caribbean immigrants and their British-born offspring, and west Londoners who'd been through the war and the bombs and the rationing. They had never quite managed to find the cash to flee, like all their better-off neighbours, from the sad and seedy old post-war Hill, where the hundred-year leases were falling in and everything else was falling down, gradually, around their ears… [it] was the place the hippies colonised. One could still find a cheap room or a tenement flat—two rooms with a shared bathroom: and a key to the communal gardens (sure, you can use my key—peace and love!). The communal gardens were full of hippies smoking weed and playing guitars.
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When Madeleine arrived, in the early 1980s, Notting Hill was still edgy. Prostitutes used the porch at All Saints as their pick-up point, while their pimps took over the nearby phone box as an office.
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Madeleine loved the surrounding streets with their nineteenth-century ‘wedding-cake architecture' and the ‘columns, balustrades, Roman arches and balconies with cast-iron trimmings', along with communal gardens, and the trees.
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She relished the bohemian feel. With her roll-your-own cigarettes and her wild hair she merged happily into the scene. And she was even closer to her favourite market stalls on Portobello Road. At Colville Gardens she nested once again. She installed some of her beloved possessions from Swinbrook Road, including a huge yellow and blue canvas painted by Dave Codling.
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She rescued cast-off objects from the street stalls and dumps, including the metal frame of a chaise longue which she hauled up the stairs, positioning it to create a unique sculpture. In her attic she hung net curtains around the bed and had a
trompe l'oeil
painted on the wall. The drawing room had pale grey walls and painted floorboards, with much of the area covered in seagrass matting. The curtains on the tall windows were antique linen, with thin blue braid sewn on a few inches in from the edges.
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And she had Darling Point, her beloved cat, for company.