Madeleine (28 page)

Madeleine was good copy. Later in her life she said that she hated ‘the whole thing with reviewers and marketing and what's happened to the novel and the way it's promoted and discussed'.
¹⁹
But she performed well for journalists.

The local London media was as interested as the Australians. Madeleine told the
Independent on Sunday
that the shortlisting had come just in time: she had been thinking of becoming a tea lady or a check-out chick to make ends meet. She had a crack at Australia as ‘such a monotone place'. Journalist Emma Cook noted the white sixties furniture and white net curtains at Colville Gardens were yellowing from Madeleine's smoking.
²⁰
The
Guardian Weekly
reported that the flat was ‘cheerfully chaotic'; Madeleine's face was ‘well-etched' and the author herself ‘gob smacked' by the attention. Madeleine talked briefly about her past and her marriage, saying Chris had ‘got distracted by
une autre femme
, so that was that'. She had ‘never managed to meet another Prince Charming to rescue me from the awful responsibility of running my own life'.
²¹
In the
Evening Standard
on 14 October—the day of the Booker announcement dinner—Madeleine suggested the shortlisting had saved her from the job centre. Neil Norman wrote that in her flat, ‘frayed rush matting makes a half-hearted attempt to conceal the flaking grey-painted floorboards…a trio of plastic ducks lie stranded in the bath and the loo seat is broken…' He noted that Madeleine ‘lights a cigarette before putting the pack down next to her asthma inhaler'.
²²
After the profiles, the
Herald
's literary pages sat up and took notice. On 27 September, the chief book reviewer Andrew Riemer looked at
The Essence of the Thing
and
A Pure Clear Light
:

St John ignores the great issues most British novelists agonise over nowadays—racism, inequality, the sins of Empire, urban decay. Instead her characters seem wholly preoccupied by the trivia of their class; work, husbands, wives, children, holidays in France, clothes, the pecking order and sex…they are for the most past vapid and shallow and banal…At first blush there is something anachronistic about these short, ironic fables…yet within the confines of her little world, St John strikes me as an accomplished writer…her ear for the pretentious is acute. I found her pared down, minimalist style eminently suited to laying bare her characters' follies and delusions.
²³

The London press was less glowing. The
Daily Telegraph
called
The
Essence of the Thing
‘the last word in banality…The writing is careless and clichéd. And Madeleine St John's cast have all the reality and depth of stick figures on a road sign.'
²⁴
The
Sunday Times
said the novel was ‘tripe…grotesquely inane'.
²⁵
Not that the critics were enamoured of other Booker candidates either, with most suggesting that
The God of Small
Things
was the only one worthy of the prize. The
Economist
noted that half the novels on the shortlist were ‘questionable choices: novels which are generally well written but are somehow smaller and less satisfying than novels which did not make the shortlist'. It included
The Essence of
the Thing
in that half. It was about ‘smart London life and could have appeared any time in the past thirty years…Though cunningly plotted, the whole thing is inoffensive and forgettable.'
²⁶

The Booker judging panel may have been divided, but the chair, Professor Beer, felt that some of the critics were against
The Essence of
the Thing
because it was:

concentrated in bourgeois life. There was a sense that this was a kind of trivial world and therefore emotionally trivial…Those of us who liked the book thought it had extraordinary concision and depth. I thought it had paced itself so beautifully; she really has this extraordinary ear for dialogue. One of the other judges commented that he had not heard the language of thirtyish people in London picked up with such accuracy before.
²⁷

Few in Madeleine's camp seriously believed she could win, but they set off with excitement to the Guildhall dinner on 14 October. Madeleine, stylishly dressed and with her bobbed hair freshly coiffured, shared a table with Victoria Barnsley and Christopher Potter from Fourth Estate and her agents Sarah Lutyens and Felicity Rubinstein.
²⁸
Also on the table was Alan Rusbridger, editor of the
Guardian.
The selection committee had met just an hour before the dinner to decide the winner, thus avoiding leaks.

Christopher fretted that Madeleine was not really being given her due by the literary glitterati that night. She had never been part of that crowd and now he thought she was being ignored even though she was in the top six. Somehow, the evening was to be endured. Part of the ceremony was the presentation to each candidate of a copy of his or her novel in a hand-tooled leather cover. Madeleine thrust her copy at Christopher. He could have it; she was not particularly impressed.
²⁹

At home, viewers of Channel 4 watched a special program anchored by arts presenter and writer Melvyn Bragg. Carmen Callil, A. S. Byatt and Will Self reviewed the shortlisted novels. They were divided on
The
Essence of the Thing.
Callil thought it very well done but damned it with faint praise: ‘If you like Joanna Trollope, you will love this novel.' Byatt said it was ‘the one I got the most out of; the one that really excited me'. She said it had to be read not as if written by Joanna Trollope but as if by Kafka. ‘It is a book about people living in a kind of smoke of thinness; they have nothing to say. It doesn't mean they don't suffer, but they have no concepts,' she said. Will Self did not agree. He was a thirty-something-year-old London professional, but the novel, ostensibly set in his world, did not resonate with him. Self said that he knew no one who resembled Madeleine's characters. But when Gillian Beer summarised each novel for the audience, she described
The Essence of the Thing
as:

a serious comedy about grief. [St John] makes the reader know what splitting up can mean; we hear the people crack and split through her frugal, perfectly poised dialogue. She [has] children speak, rare in fiction. Taking a very narrow social group she uncovers profound differences of relationship within it.
³⁰

The summaries over, Beer announced
The God of Small Things
the winner. There was a whisper of disapproval around the Guildhall. The
Guardian's
Lisa Jardine wrote later that ‘the critics seemed determined to trash Arundhati Roy before the words were out of Professor Beer's mouth'.
³¹
In the fallout,
The Essence of the Thing
scarcely rated a mention. The evening over, Christopher Potter accompanied Madeleine into the deserted streets to search for a taxi.

It was disappointing for Madeleine, but the Booker experience opened new doors as well as some old ones that had been closed for years. Friends in Australia wrote to Madeleine to congratulate her. Jane Holdsworth rounded up the gang from Kensington Church Street for a supper party for Madeleine. The guests watched the Channel 4 telecast on tape and agreed that Madeleine looked terrific.
³²

Madeleine was still churning through people, pulling them in and spitting them out. Celia Irvine and David Bambridge, her friends from All Saints, dropped away. Jacqueline Bateman, a friend of Celia's, continued to visit Madeleine, stopping by at Colville Gardens with a bottle of wine every few weeks. She enjoyed their chats about everything from grammar to the British aristocracy, but she knew Madeleine was ‘capable of being very rude to people; she treated people as if she was the headmistress to five-year-old kids. She could be terribly autocratic.'
³³
They agreed on their favourite book—Thomas Pynchon's
The Crying of Lot 49
—but decided his other works,
V
and
Gravity's Rainbow
, were ‘as boring as batshit'. Then, one day in the autumn of 1997, home after a summer in Barbados and a side trip to Cuba, Jacqueline went to Colville Gardens with a copy of a fashion magazine from the 1930s that she had bought from a street market in Havana. It should have been the perfect gift for Madeleine. But, as often happened when one of her friends went out of their way to spoil her, Madeleine reacted badly. It was as if she was pre-empting the abandonment that she connected with intimacy. It was the last time Jacqueline saw her.

It was much the same with Colette and Aaron. With the royalties from her books, Madeleine flew them both to London for Christmas. But the visit went badly. ‘It was monstrous to be there,' Colette recalled. ‘Part of the problem was she was so terribly sick and she was pretending not to be.'
³⁴
Aaron turned twelve that December. He was disappointed with the lack of family warmth from Madeleine. But when Colette was out of the flat, she would sit him down at the dining table and instruct him in etiquette. Aaron recalled: ‘I saw it as a loving act, the first time anyone sat down and said—this is how you act.' It reminded him of visiting his grandparents, Ted and Val. He did not begrudge his aunt: ‘She was trying to help me, better me.'
³⁵

In 1998 Madeleine welcomed Libby Smith, one of the Octopus gang from Sydney University days. She and Madeleine had lost touch when Libby joined the Sydney Push, married, had children and worked in New Guinea and Canberra. But they re-established contact after the Booker publicity. The plump young Madeleine of the 1960s was now fashionably thin. Libby thought that she had all but stopped eating. She found Madeleine still ‘gentle and kind' on one level but also ‘hypocritical and judgmental'. She seemed hostile to Australia, a terrible snob and much more conservative in her views than when she had been young. Madeleine bought tickets to the West End production of
Oklahoma!
starring Hugh Jackman, but was upset when she discovered Jackman, whom she admired, was Australian.

She was enjoying the fame of the Booker and had ‘a sense of vanity' about living at a Notting Hill address. She was still keen to educate Libby in all sorts of things, including the correct form of manners to adopt if, by chance, they were invited to a country home for the weekend. It was a disappointing encounter for Libby. At university, she had looked up to Madeleine, but now her old friend seemed trapped in a past that no longer existed.
³⁶

Madeleine continue to let her friends down. Esther Whitby was working on a memoir of her days at Andre Deutsch and wrote with some feeling of her former client, ‘Madeleine St John, whom I would go to see in her fifth-floor eyrie overlooking or, rather, confronting, the spire of the church to which she made frequent visits.' She was:

clever and delightfully eccentric, she was one of the most amusing people I have known. She was also one of the most malicious. I wish I could remember what she said when over a cup of tea at the Chelsea Flower Show, after a particularly savage remark I told her this, with something like admiration…At this time her star had not yet risen. It was only a year or so later when the first of her god-laced-with-adulterous-upper-class-sex novels was shortlisted for the Booker that among the flurry of excited phone calls from friends who still worked at Deutsch and thought of her as ‘my author' her voice was absent.
³⁷

In Sydney, in the aftermath of the Booker publicity, Chris Tillam went in search of ‘relics' from their marriage. He sent Madeleine a bundle of letters she had written to Joan and the book of photographs that she had compiled in her last days in Boston. He apologised for waiting so long to return a couple of family mementoes. ‘As for the little book, Joan had it for thirty years, you should have it for the next thirty,' Chris wrote. He told his ex-wife that he had ‘tried to read your novels, but they're not my cup of tea'.
³⁸
Madeleine did not reply.

She had always found ‘The World' to be a ‘very funny place, which we never quite get used to'.
³⁹
As she got older, and her world narrowed to Colville Gardens, she began to focus more than ever on her childhood. She spent hours talking to Sarah Lutyens about the road from the centre of Sydney to the house she lived in in Watsons Bay as a child. Images of the past were seared in her memory, but she was a British citizen now and she was angry at the Australian press for claiming her as an Australian.

CHAPTER TWENTY
A Sense of Betrayal

Four years after Ted's death, Madeleine was still owed $5000 of the $10,000 allocated to her in his will. She wrote to Val asking for the money and for Colette's bequest to be paid. Madeleine had few compunctions about the demands. She had always felt Ted owed her money from her Cargher grandparents and that he had not supported her when she needed help in London. To Madeleine, scraping by in London, her father and Val looked well off.

In fact, Ted valued influence as much as money and had often pursued cases, causes and projects that did not deliver high fees. And he was ‘hopeless with money'.
¹
He had left Val asset rich but cash poor and she struggled to pay his bequest to Madeleine. Ted and Val had thought the Clifton Gardens house would fund their later years, but they were caught by the property slump at the end of the 1980s and sold Vino del Mar for a relatively low price. They bought a less expensive property at Bayview on the northern beaches, with the aim of living on the money left over. But they were soon running out of cash, and in 1994 Ted tried unsuccessfully to sell their Mt Elliot holiday house. When Ted died, Val converted the downstairs area at Bayview into a self-contained flat to rent and kept the Mt Elliot property on the market. She sent Madeleine $5000 and gave Colette $3200 over the next three or four years, but it was not until mid-1998 that she sold part of the Mt Elliot land, for well below the anticipated price.
²
Patrick bought one of the blocks to help his mother.