Madeleine (30 page)

Beautiful, desirable Barbara has no career and no direction. She has no trouble attracting men, but the one she wants, the married Alex, she cannot have, and the one who wants her, the divorced Andrew, she does not love. Barbara, living in a housekeeper's flat in Belsize Park—a suburb where Madeleine once lived—makes moral decisions about both men. She refuses to take advantage of Andrew by leading him on, and she refuses to pursue a clandestine affair with Alex.

Madeleine's religious faith is on display as the novel examines the struggle between desire and duty and the complicated connections between the carnal and spiritual sides of human nature. This is explicit in a scene in which Alex, in bed with Barbara, ponders the lines from the marriage ceremony in the
Book of Common Prayer
—With my body I thee worship. ‘“To think,” he said, “that the best, the truest, the most literal description of sex that we have in the language is from the hand of some Tudor clergyman, Cranmer, I suppose…”'
⁵
The balancing act between body and soul is deliciously present in the title of the novel, which comes from the title of a George Gershwin song.
⁶

Chris Tillam once wrote that the precision of Madeleine's writing ‘had its origin in another practice', referring to her study of the piano.
⁷
But Madeleine had stopped playing the piano long ago. She indicated to Jane Holdsworth that it was too painful: music unleashed so many strong emotions. But music was important to Madeleine. An appreciation of a range of styles from classical to jazz to popular, along with literature and theatre, was part of what it was to be educated. There is every reason to believe that, like Barbara in
A Stairway to Paradise
, Madeleine could hum her way through the Gershwin songbook.

In
A Stairway to Paradise
, children are wise beyond their years and yet vulnerable to the passions and obtuseness of their parents. It contains what can be read as an explicit depiction of Madeleine's childhood memories of the Castlecrag years in the 1950s. Marguerite, aged eleven, and her brother Percy, nine, debate when and if their parents will divorce. The children are as anxious and knowing as the two little girls in Castlecrag in 1954. ‘He was now standing still, thinking, he was considering his parents. “They're much
nicer
,” he said at last, “when they're not together.”'
⁸

Christopher Potter was disappointed with the manuscript. He felt
Stairway
was not as crisp as Madeleine's earlier works.
⁹
And the book's production was marred by arguments over the cover. Madeleine had not been happy with the treatment Fourth Estate gave
A Pure Clear
Light
or the paperback of
The Essence of the Thing
. Potter fretted that Fourth Estate had never published Madeleine quite as well as he would have liked. ‘We never got the look of the thing right and I was always in a battle with marketing [who wanted] to make the books look more popular.' He wanted the covers to be ‘more literary, cooler'.
¹⁰
The production of
Stairway
stretched everyone's patience as Madeleine complained endlessly through her agent. Sarah Lutyens faxed Madeleine's criticisms to Potter.
¹¹
The agent and publisher were close but the exchange tested their friendship. Potter reminded Sarah that ‘Madeleine's control of the jacket cannot stretch to the colour of the flaps and particularly not for the “reason” that yellow = fever + blue = bad luck. This isn't a book of feng shui.'
¹²
Madeleine, Sarah realised yet again, had the knack of putting one in a position where it was hard to maintain perspective. ‘Her views were so black and white, so morally unbendable, so something that one thought was minor she thought of as major indeed,' Sarah recalled.
¹³

Madeleine dedicated this fourth novel to Kathy Kettler, her friend from her San Francisco days. She was enormously grateful to Kathy for her support at a time when she felt herself to be on the edge of a nervous collapse, but the women had lost touch when Madeleine and Chris moved to Harvard. She had no way of telling Kathy about the dedication, but perhaps she thought that with the book due to be published in the US, her friend would discover the honour. But Kathy knew nothing of the novel, or the dedication, until long after Madeleine's death.
¹⁴

A Stairway to Paradise
was published in March 1999, and if Potter was a little disappointed with the manuscript and Madeleine anguished over the cover, the Booker shortlisting meant that literary London paid attention. In
The Times
, Helen Dunmore said the novel was a ‘moral comedy as well as a social one'. The characters in the book ‘grope forwards, propelled by the sense that their lives are not as they might be'. Dunmore praised Madeleine's strength as a ‘sharp mimic and astute observer of the self-deceptions that mask life's sadness', but also noted that sometimes her ‘moral rock' was too close to the surface ‘and her points too thoroughly made'.
¹⁵

In the
Sunday Times,
Stephen Amidon said Madeleine had once again proven herself to be an ‘elegant, droll observer of modern erotic folly'. Alex was particularly well drawn as a character, an Englishman prevented from being a great lover by a surfeit of good manners. Amidon thought Barbara less successfully drawn, with her ‘aimlessness bordering on vapidity'.
¹⁶
David Robson in the
Sunday Telegraph
found the novel far more substantial than
The Essence of the Thing.
‘Not since Mary Wesley has the literary scene been blessed with such an intriguing late developer.' The pleasure of the book, he wrote, was not its plot, but its dialogue: ‘She not only has an ear for the cadences of daily speech but a nose for those terse, pregnant exchanges in which the whole course of a life can alter in a matter of seconds.'
¹⁷

Felicity Baker sent copies of the reviews to Antony and Eliza Minchin with a note: ‘I think M has reached a point where journalists will take seriously everything that comes from her—good!'
¹⁸

But Madeleine was not easily satisfied. A few months later she argued with Potter about the cover for the paperback edition of the novel: ‘Sorry to come back with so many objections: am not a happy bunny.'
¹⁹

She was happier with American editions of her books. Her New York publishers presented the novels as sophisticated and stylish literary works. Carroll & Graf used a modern painterly look in the three covers designed by Christine van Bree for the ‘London' novels—
Essence
,
Stairway
, and
A Pure Clear Light
. Kent Carroll would have published
The Women in
Black
as well, but the rights were tied up with Deutsch.

Madeleine was now well known enough to be commissioned by newspapers for the occasional piece. On 27 April 1999, the
Guardian
ran a short article by her about Notting Hill. The film of the same name, starring Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant, was opening that night, and Madeleine reflected on the changes in her neighbourhood. But she was horrified with the editing of the article by the
Guardian
and she was anxious the same thing would not happen to another piece for the
Daily Telegraph
, part of a weekend feature called ‘My Favourite Flower'. Madeleine chose gardenias, the flowers of her Aunt Josette's wedding bouquet. Sarah Lutyens wrote to the
Daily Telegraph
: ‘Madeleine has just had an appalling experience with the
Guardian
when a piece of hers on Notting Hill was massacred and she has said that she doesn't want the piece used unless it is run as she has written it…'
²⁰

Gardenias were important to Madeleine. The flowers appear in
A Pure Clear Light
when adulterer Simon sends them guiltily to his wife. They are very French, a favourite choice for buttonholes for French men in times past. Madeleine's untitled piece is filled with childhood memories, especially of her mother Sylvette—surely the person referred to as Solange—‘trapped in the smallest possible cage' of her marriage.

The gardenias arrived late in the afternoon in a fragile florist's box tied with white gauze ribbon; the very ribbon, even, had most supremely carefully to be untied. The slightest touch—my dear—the very slightest breath!—might damage them, when they would begin immediately to go yellow, and then—oh, horror!—brown: they would be as good as dead before you even left the house. They had to be put in a cool—the very coolest—place, altogether alone (preferably under guard, in fact) until the absolutely last moment, when they might at last be pinned on. And when, in the penultimate moment the box was opened, and their perfume was released—when one was at last permitted to drink in the divine odour—then, and only then, did one truly understand that this was to be, in its length and breadth, a gala occasion: and that was why there had been so much rushing about, and fearful fussing, and argument; such last-minute stitches in time, and cries of near despair, and anxious dartings here and there: and the infinitely frail and fragrant gardenia was the only proper pinnacle of it all. This truth was revealed to me, as a child, staying for a weekend with my maternal grandparents, with my twenty-year-old aunt preparing—or being prepared—to go to a dance: far away in a lost place where young girls went out with gardenias in their hair joyfully to meet their doom while the band played
Take the A Train.
Solange was someone I got to know only after her gardenia days were done: after they'd worked their awful magic, after she'd been trapped in the smallest possible cage. But she had gardenias in her mind: she managed one hopeful morning to acquire two infant gardenia plants. She looked at them solemnly and joyously, holding her children's hands while she explained the importance of never—never!—touching the flowers. They all looked solemnly, joyously at the twin infant gardenias: it was one of those lessons for life.

I saw some gardenia plants very like them being flogged off at a fiver a time in Portobello Road last summer. Why not? I thought—me with my flat, my flowerpots. But I remembered the look in the eyes of Solange, on the day when it had finally to be faced that one of her gardenia plants was definitely, irremediably dead. Never again that fathomless sorrow, I thought: never that awful night. I'll wait until I have the greenhouse, I thought, walking away up Portobello—the greenhouse expressly for gardenias—in the Chinese style, say. A
pavilion chinois
where one might drink gardenia-scented tea in the late afternoon. And a gardener expressly for the gardenias. He could wear a Chinese hat. One can just about hear the tiny bells ringing in the late afternoon breeze on the hipped roof of the Gardenia Pavilion. There is a very polite notice—possibly in Chinese—which says: Please Do Not Touch the Gardenias. Thank you.

The piece was not published. Perhaps it was deemed too elliptical for the paper, or perhaps they knew that it would be impossible to convince Madeleine that it needed editing. Madeleine was incandescent when it was dropped. She had laboured over it and now the press was trampling on her childhood.
²¹
Sarah carried the load. She realised Madeleine was so vulnerable that writing would only become more difficult for her.

Lutyens & Rubinstein now did everything possible to capitalise on Madeleine's Booker fame.
²²
Sarah had already secured about 100,000 DM for German publications and about £7000 for publication in Israel and Denmark. And Madeleine earned US$24,000 from the US editions of her books between 1999 and 2001.

Susannah Godman tried to interest filmmakers in
Stairway.
‘We found Madeleine's writing rich and witty,' Angus Towler, script editor at London Weekend Television's drama unit, wrote to Susannah in April 1999. ‘However, I'm afraid we weren't convinced that the plot was sufficiently well-layered to span three or four episodes of a television serial.'
²³
Irena Meldris, script executive at Picture Palace Films Limited in London, said:

I very much enjoyed Madeleine's perceptive, mesmerising writing that takes one on a journey of inner rather than outer landscape. And I found Barbara's character easy to identify with, her unfulfilled meanderings being one of the most distinctive features of the end of the 90s generation.
²⁴

But, she said, it would not work as a film.

In 2000 Madeleine put a stop to Sarah's efforts to sell her books to foreign language publishers and banned translation of her books, so agitated was she by some of the results. She sent a letter to Sarah:

This is to confirm—or to reassure you that you were not dreaming when you heard me say—that I do not want any more translation rights in any of my novels to be sold. The fiasco of the French [translation incident] having demonstrated the futility (to say no worse) of the exercise. And I am more than sorry that I did not manage to make this entirely clear earlier and that you have been to the trouble of talking
l'oeuvre
up at Frankfurt & for all I know elsewhere…Again—sorry about all this but what can you do? As they say. If we don't speak again before then—A very, very happy Xmas. Madeleine.
²⁵

Sarah had been Madeleine's agent for seven years and the author had always been high maintenance. But her contrariness escalated as her health deteriorated. Increasingly, Sarah found it difficult to get anything right for her demanding client. As she said, ‘The tragedy was that Madeleine could never wholly embrace the good things that came her way.'
²⁶

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
A Tourist in Athens

In the autumn of 1999, with four books published, Madeleine fulfilled a dream of travelling to Greece. Her emphysema was getting worse, but she had never before had the money to be a tourist and now she was determined to see more of the world.