Madeleine (24 page)

Madeleine had lived outside of Australia for almost thirty years, but now she turned to the Sydney of her childhood and teenage years.
The
Women in Black
, set largely in a department store called Goode's in the 1960s, sparkles with hope and humanity. Madeleine was still experiencing inner turmoil but she believed that there were enough sad novels in the world.
²
That she wrote a light-hearted novel set in Sydney is, however, extraordinary given what the city represented to her. Sydney was the ‘gothic' city associated with the tragic death of Sylvette and the stepmother who had replaced her so quickly at Castlecrag. It was the city of the father who had rejected her and the location of her loss and abandonment. But she put her anger aside to write about the past with affection and forgiveness. Indeed, while
The Women in Black
is not autobiographical, writing it was likely therapeutic, allowing Madeleine to enjoy a more idealised version of her home city.

Madeleine drew on the people she knew for many of her characters. The most spectacular example of art imitating life is Magda, the saleswoman in charge of Model Gowns at Goode's. Magda is a Slovenian immigrant married to a Hungarian, Stefan. Husband and wife are exotic, glamorous and sophisticated. Magda's confident European sensibility sets her apart from the other ‘women in black' who are good, solid types, but who cannot match Magda's style and exuberance. It is easy to see Madeleine crafting Magda as a blend of her French mother and Friedel Souhami, the German immigrant whom Madeleine knew in Castlecrag. In the 1930s, before her marriage to Ted, Sylvette sold cosmetics and, like all the Cargher women, she adored clothes and saw them as objects of beauty. Clothes mattered to Madeleine: she was always a ‘considered' dresser, one friend recalled.
³

The teenager in
The Women in Black—
the school-leaver Lesley, who adopts the more sophisticated name of Lisa when she goes to work at Goode's for the summer—shares Madeleine's sensibilities, though Lisa's family is lower middle-class, a few rungs down from the St Johns. Unlike Lisa, Madeleine did not face family resistance to her going to university, but she claimed that had she not won a Commonwealth scholarship Ted would not have allowed her to go. Some of Madeleine's university friends saw Colleen Olliffe and her family as the model for Lisa's family.
⁴
The Olliffes lived in the unfashionable southern suburb of Kingsford, and Colleen's father, Joe, was a proofreader. Colleen worked in the ‘Christmas rush' at Sydney department stores.

The novel resonates with Madeleine's emotional experience. Lisa is offered a choice between the dominant but mundane world of Anglo-Australia and the vivid future promised by the migrants arriving in Sydney after the war. Madeleine's life as a child and teenager oscillated between these worlds, but
The Women in Black
rises beyond the divisions. There is acceptance as the newcomers show the Australians different ways to live and as the migrants are reshaped by their new country. It is a big idea, this clash of cultures, but lightly articulated by Madeleine
.
The novel is warm but not sentimental. Madeleine is amused by rather than judgmental of the society she describes. When Frank rushes away after a night of abandoned sex with his wife, Madeleine offers a telling commentary on the Australian male, but there is humour and compassion. In her fiction, Madeleine revealed a humanity she could not always summon in life.

She dedicated the novel to M & Mme J. M. Cargher. Her grandparents, with their different foods and accents, their menial jobs and marginal place in Australian life, were put centre stage. The dispossessed Europeans became the teachers who were ready to guide the Anglo-Australians to a more refined world. As Magda says, ‘Ah, the people here know nothing.'
⁵

Elements of Madeleine's early life appear in the novel. Lisa's fascination with a special party dress in Model Gowns recalls Madeleine's love of her mother's Dior copy, which she was wearing the last day Madeleine saw her. Sylvette's life resonated in the story of Rudi as he looks for an Australian wife. Madeleine was never sure why Sylvette married Ted.
⁶
The novel offers an explanation: Rudi and Fay—just like Sylvette and Ted—will both gain from their partnership. Fay looks forward to a bigger life when she weds the European, while Rudi will find a place in his new world, through his Australian spouse.

Madeleine showed the manuscript to James Hughes, who saw immediately that it was a very different proposition from the Blavatsky biography. He sent it to Esther Whitby, an old friend, with whom he had worked at Andre Deutsch.
⁷
The company published many great writers—John Updike, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, V. S. Naipaul, Brian Moore, Jean Rhys and Gitta Sereny among others—and was one of London's most respected houses. Esther Whitby was a talented editor and she thought Madeleine's novel was ‘in every way a perfect little book'.
⁸
Her colleagues agreed that it was an exciting find, just the sort of writing the small publisher relished. And Madeleine was given a contract and paid an advance of £1000, a small but welcome sum.

In March 1992, she talked to James Hughes about a commission from his firm, Mitchell Beazley, to write a book on fairies. She was excited: it would pay ‘seriouser money than novels do & it's the dole queue again for me if it doesn't come off!'
⁹
Hughes, her ‘dear friend and mentor', wanted her to do the book, but the project came to nothing.

Thank God for her ‘jobette' as a salesperson at an antique shop. Madeleine knew nothing about antiques, but she was good at sales, conversing brightly with clients. Every Saturday, she packed her minuscule lunch and headed to Stockspring in Kensington. She introduced herself to customers as a writer and often interrogated them about their lives. She was writing about the London professionals who lived and worked around her and her job was a time for empirical research. She even asked clients what cheeses they had in their fridges. Also working from the Stockspring space was Robert McPherson, a dealer who sold through the shop. He and Madeleine became friends, sometimes visiting each other's homes for drinks. An Englishman less than half her age, McPherson was a good match for this brittle Australian who was intent on presenting herself as more English than the English.

Madeleine wanted people to know where the St Johns slotted into society. Everyone was ‘judged, ranked and organised in her mind', Robert recalled. She was fascinated by his girlfriend Georgina, who was from a French aristocratic family. But Robert thought Madeleine's politics were, ‘like a lot of things in her life, somewhat confused. She had left leanings but she always wanted to support the upper class, and the two did not go together at all.'
¹⁰

She still smoked heavily, retreating to the back office at Stockspring to roll her cigarettes. She often sat in the dark, and Robert assumed she felt more secure without the lights. There was ‘a sadness about her', an aggression and vulnerability that suggested depression, he recalled. ‘I always felt she was sort of on the outside, watching, like a commentator and not always getting involved.'
¹¹
The antique shops on Kensington Church Street formed a lively community and Madeleine made friends with Jane Holdsworth, who also worked at Stockspring. Sometimes a small group would gather for supper at Costa's Grill, a nearby Greek restaurant. Madeleine revealed the story of Sylvette and Ted, and Val, but it was not a major discussion. She told Jane about Sylvette's death. ‘She did not go on and on but dropped bits, and you were meant to take them up. They were like asides really.' Asides that had been honed over decades. Her friends were never in any doubt her childhood had scarred her. But Jane felt Madeleine had a strong sense of self: ‘Hers wasn't the kind of character that shrunk in on itself.'
¹²

To some, Madeleine seemed quintessentially French. Even her pukka accent could easily have been the English acquired by a French speaker, according to one Stockspring client, Old Bailey judge and porcelain collector, Sir Stephen Mitchell. He was impressed by Madeleine, who seemed nothing like a regular ‘shop girl'. For years, Sir Stephen had a Saturday morning routine, driving from his Hampstead home to trawl the Kensington Church Street shops for eighteenth-century Derby porcelain. He was a passionate and expert collector and he usually spent an hour or two at Stockspring, part of it in conversation with Madeleine. He picked her as a daughter of a lawyer from the way she reasoned. He found her an engaging conversationalist: observant and a clear thinker with an excellent vocabulary. She spoke English exceptionally well and had ‘a marvellous strong voice'. She was dry and witty and tuned into popular culture and politics. He recalled that while some of her clothes looked as if they had come from Oxfam, Madeleine managed to seem French and elegant. He assumed she was short of cash, but she never complained about her circumstances.
¹³

As the publication date for
The Women in Black
approached, publicist Christobel Kent drummed up interest, pitching the book as ‘a literary novel that reads with the ease of a soap opera…a sex-and-shopping novel as Muriel Spark might have written it'. The information sheet to booksellers and sales agents described Madeleine as ‘an Australian of the same vintage as Clive James and Germaine Greer—need we say more'. The novel was set in ‘the world of Jacques Fath [a post-war designer who was a contemporary of Christian Dior and Pierre Balmain] not Vivienne Westwood [the British designer who made punk fashionable]'. A brief biographical note said Madeleine had supported herself in London with a variety of menial jobs. ‘Basically I was a
flaneuse
until I took up writing at—as you can see—the eleventh hour,' Madeleine quipped.
¹⁴

The Woman's Hour
on BBC Radio 4 serialised
The Women in Black
for its daily book reading in February and March. The reader for the ten episodes was Nicolette McKenzie, a New Zealand actor who had worked in London for many years. True to form, Madeleine found fault: the voice was ‘ghastly…broad but ersatz BBC Australian'. The broadcast was ‘very abridged, with a blunt instrument—but what the hell'.
¹⁵
She feigned indifference, but London friends felt that Madeleine was delighted with the fanfare, especially when she was interviewed by Michael Rosen for the BBC World Service book program.

On publication day, 25 February 1993, the publishers took their author to lunch, presented her with flowers and made a fuss.
¹⁶
She inscribed a copy of the novel to her editor: ‘For Esther, undying gratitude and love. Madeleine.' Shena Mackay called
The Women in Black
a ‘small masterpiece'. In her review she said: ‘Apparently artlessly told, without condescension to its characters, it is actually a highly sophisticated work, full of funny, sharp and subtle observations of Australian life, and laconic, inconsequential and inarticulate dialogue which speaks volumes.'
The Times Literary Supplement
ran a review from Nicola Walker. She was not so kind.
The Women in Black
was a ‘twee, not unenjoyable little tale, written in a whimsical style', but with ‘stilted, vapid sentences'. Walker criticised Madeleine for not engaging with her main subject directly: ‘St John merely tickles the perpetual Australian dilemma of multiculturalism, [and offers only] fairy-tale resolutions'.
¹⁷
Abacus bought the paperback rights for what Madeleine called a ‘derisory sum',
¹⁸
but her Kensington friends noticed the spring in her step. Robert McPherson recalled: ‘She was suddenly given some validity, she felt she could do more than antiques on Saturday. There was an intellectual status, not the fame of being on telly, but the fame of books and writing.'
¹⁹

The novel was not published in Australia, but the English edition was distributed here. Copies were hard to find and the St John clan heard about Madeleine's success via Florence and Felicity. Colette was disappointed that stores were not making a fuss. She was proud of her sister's achievement, even though it contrasted sharply with her own struggles at the time. Her marriage to Steve Lippincott had ended not long after the family had arrived in the US in 1987, and she had struggled to raise Aaron alone. In 1990 Ted paid for fares back home and Colette and Aaron moved to the northern beaches of Sydney.

Patrick St John was living in London with his wife Karen in a flat not far from Colville Gardens. The couple often walked past All Saints, directly below Madeleine's windows, and wondered if they would bump into her. Patrick assumed his half-sister knew that he was living in London, because she was still in touch with their aunt Florence. Madeleine could make the first move, he decided.
²⁰

In Sydney, Ted St John was privately thrilled that Madeleine was now a published author, but there was no reconciliation.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Dear Ted

Ted's approval mattered to Madeleine, and she was drawn back time and again to the wounds of her childhood. The publication of
The Women in Black
was evidence, surely, to her father that she was worthy of his love. But Ted was almost grudging in his comments. He wrote to Josette in Adelaide and included a review of the book that had been sent by Florence Heller from London:

This review isn't too flattering—but Florence says the reviewer was probably jealous! Being serialised on the BBC is no small thing. F says she can remember M saying years ago that she thought she could write a book which would be serialised on the BBC—and some years later, hey presto!

He added that ‘Val has started to read M's book and likes it', but gave no sign that he intended to read it himself.
¹