Relatively Famous

by Roger Averill

  To make it easier for myself I had been delivering my questions to the television. I turned now to face her. She was crying. Tears were not one of Nat’s rhetorical tactics; she never needed them. I felt cruel for having made her cry, yet the tears themselves made me even angrier. Wasn’t I the wronged one here? If anyone should be crying, shouldn’t it be me?

  Nat opened her mouth but no words came out.

  By 1914 Britain had gone to war with Germany and the biggest market for Welsh slate disappeared overnight.

  I muted the tellie, as if to help Nat find her voice. Between silent sobs, she managed, ‘I was too scared to. I thought it would tear us apart … telling you.’

  I handed her my handkerchief. She blew her nose, dabbed her eyes. My higher ground was subsiding fast. I didn’t want to concede so easily, but what she had said made sense, and was probably true.

  I reached over and rested a hand on her back. ‘I was embarrassed,’ I said, trying to explain my anger. ‘With Martin, of all people …’

  Nat blew her nose again. The tears had stopped. ‘I’d already decided to turn it down,’ she said, her voice still wavering. ‘That’s why I hadn’t told you. I was trying to save you the dilemma – to protect you. Protect us.’

  Along with David Storey’s Saville, In Darkest Light was joint winner of the 1976 Booker Prize. With the firm opinions of the two other judges irreconcilably divided (Francis King being bunkered in for Saville and Mary Wilson for Darkest Light), the panel’s chair, academic and journalist Walter Allen, said he could not personally split the two novels and in the end used his casting vote to award the prize to both. With that decision, Gilbert Madigan became the first Australian to win what was rapidly becoming the most prestigious book award in the Anglophone world, shadowed only by the Pulitzer. Not even the recently anointed Australian Nobel laureate, Patrick White,° had been accorded this honour, a fact duly noted in the literary pages of most Australian newspapers.º

  The issue of the Booker going to an Antipodean author scarcely rated a mention in the British media because it had, in earlier years, already gone to colonials of other stripes and, perhaps more crucially, England had long ago adopted Madigan as one of its own; his Australianness a minor and fading blemish. Far more controversial was it being another split decision, coming only two years after the tie between Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist and Stanley Middleton’s Holiday. Writing in The Times, Julian Aitken archly suggested, ‘if literature is to be reduced to a league table more appropriate to sweatier pursuits, then surely the Booker judges must grasp the nettle and learn to judge, key to this task being the crowning of a single winner’. Once the dust of the ritual Booker dust-up finally settled, most commentators agreed that both titles were worthy of the recognition, with many suggesting Madigan should by then have had two Bookers on his shelf, with Freedom Falling having been inexplicably overlooked even for the shortlist in 1970, the prize’s second year.

  For his part, Madigan seemed genuinely surprised to have won the award. Several years later, in an Australian television interview with Andrea Stretton for The Book Show, he confessed that In Darkest Light was by far his most personal book. ‘Writing it was a tonic to me, a kind of release. I had no conception of how it read to others. In that sense it was the least striving of the books I’d written, so I was totally taken aback when they told me it had won the Booker – along with Dave Storey’s book, of course, which I thought was brilliant. I couldn’t have been more shocked. Thrilled. Honoured, of course. But shocked. Definitely shocked.’

  Rumours have long persisted that Madigan’s public triumph with the Booker win was accompanied by a deeper,more personal defeat. The original source of the story is now unclear,* but scuttlebutt had it that on the night of the ceremony, after the official announcement, the congratulatory drinks and media commitments, Madigan and Annie Edwards returned to their room at the Grosvenor, where they ordered more champagne and enjoyed celebratory sex, after which Edwards announced that their relationship was over. As if a kind of vengeful muse, she is meant to have declared her mission accomplished; that having successfully returned him to his vocation she was now free to leave him.

  The mythic qualities of this tale always called into question its veracity. Edwards now resides in a high-end retirement village in Dorset, and is – ironically, given the conceit of the book she inspired – going blind with macular degeneration. She is adamant that the truth of their parting was both far more prosaic and far more complicated. ‘The night of the Booker ceremony was marvellous. One of those rare, golden occasions when you really do feel you’re living a life you might read about in a book. No, Gilbert and I had a wonderful time that evening. The breakup came a few weeks later.’ By Edwards’s account, both she and Madigan had long track records of not staying the course in their relationships. Later in life, while in therapy, she realised her commitment issues stemmed from abandonment anxiety triggered by the disappearance of her father when she was nine. ‘I always had to abandon my lovers before they abandoned me. Gil’s father had died suddenly just before the Booker announcement and he was away a lot, sorting things out for his mother and doing readings and signings for the publisher. I could feel him drifting, so I cut him free. I think he was used to being the leaver, not the left, but he seemed to get over it well enough.’ In later correspondence, Edwards admitted to feeling pleased that she had ‘managed to return him to himself. There was something broken in Gil when we first met, and that time in Wark, our time together, and, of course, his writing of Darkest Light, mended it somehow.’

  ° Patrick White was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1973. He was the first, and remains the only, Australian author to be so honoured.

  º Interestingly when The Twyborn Affair was shortlisted for the Booker in 1979, White withdrew it from competition.

  * It has long been thought that Edwards was the source of this rumour, but on the evidence presented here, it seems more likely to have come from the fevered imagination of a mischievous third party.

  Sinclair Hughes, Inside the Lion’s Den: The Literary Life of Gilbert Madigan, p. 207-208.

  CHAPTER NINE

  While I never made it to New York – well, not until 1988 and not on Gil’s coin – I did visit him in England in 1976, not long after he won the Booker, which was not then the global literary event it is today. In fact, none of my friends at Brunswick High had even heard of it, and when I told them about Gil’s win they thought it strangely childlike that a prize for books was called the Booker. ‘So it’d be like the Brownlow being called “the Footballer”?’ If my father had won that medal, awarded to the best and fairest player in the Victorian Football League, I would have burned from basking in so much reflected glory. As it was, with Mac having moved to another school (at least in part, I imagine, to reduce the chance of embarrassing me), the only one to mention it was the ancient, unpopular geography teacher, Mrs Brennan. There was nothing from my English teacher, who I don’t think read books beyond the ones he was teaching.

  Mum was apprehensive about me travelling by myself, but I was sixteen and confident I was an adult, or at least ready to become one. Boarding the plane at Tullamarine, though, I quickly realised I was out of my depth and began what was to be a lifelong course in learning how to push the panic down. Heading through the customs doors, I essayed a swagger in the hope of fooling myself as much as my mother, who was giving me her own brave face. Knowing Gil better than me, she perhaps had a clearer sense of the perils towards which I was journeying. I was expecting a repeat of Sydney, only on a grander, international scale.

  The flight, being a novelty, was for the most part thrilling, though both the novelty and the thrill had worn thin by the end. Mum had requested a window seat for me and I spent the first three hours peering down at the clouds and the flattened topography, mesmerised by the patterns and colours of central Australia, the world stretched out beneath me like an Indigenous dot painting. I had heard people complain about airline foo
d, but I loved the tiny containers and how people brought it to me unbidden, and that I could request a drink at any time. The air hostesses played along and treated me more like an adult than a child, their extra attention, I happily assumed, being due to my precocious urbanity.

  Somewhere over Asia, they screened All the President’s Men on the bulkhead, a film I ordinarily would not have seen. I had heard of Watergate, but didn’t really know what it was about. That film, combined with the dismissal of the Whitlam government exactly a year earlier, triggered my deep suspicion of those in power – something that didn’t help my relationship with Natalie thirty years on.

  When not staring out the window, eating, or watching films, I read The Catcher in the Rye. Gil had sent it to me for my birthday and I wanted to have read it before seeing him, fearing he might quiz me on it. Holden Caulfield, too, was perhaps contributing to my sense of premature disappointment with the adult world, the one I so desperately wanted to join. As his train approached New York – for me, already a city of disappointed dreams – I began thinking about my own destination. I had left London as a young boy and my memories of England had become fragmentary and frosted, as if viewed through the ice crystals that used to creep across the window panes of our cottage in the Cotswolds.

  Clearest, because most miserable, were my recollections of Stroud. Mum, I now realised, was deeply despondent, if not clinically depressed, after her marriage ended. Both of us were virtually friendless: she, working long hours in the tearooms; me, dealing with the jibes and jabs of my tormentors at the primary school. Resting my head on the plane’s juddering porthole, my mind drifted from reverie to dream as I fantasised about running into my Stroudian nemesis, Simon Cunningham. Towering over his now stunted frame, I humiliated him with my wit in front of what turned out to be my class at Brunswick High, with Gil weirdly deputising as a teacher, smiling approvingly from behind a wooden desk.

  Carefully copying the moves of my fellow passengers, I disembarked at Heathrow and made my way through customs. The electronic doors made a sucking sound as they sealed behind me in the arrivals area. Searching the crowd for Gil, I wasn’t sure how he would play it – eager and ebullient or cool and standoffish – so I prepared myself for either possibility. I hadn’t seen him in two years, and to help him spot me I had warned him about how much I had grown. Scanning the expectant faces of the passengers’ friends and relatives pushing up against the barrier, I couldn’t see him. Clearing the barricaded section, I walked through the throng, heaving my suitcase, trying to make it look light. As I made another pass through the crowd, it became clear he wasn’t there.

  My first impulse was to contact Mum. She was asleep on the other side of the globe, of course, so that made no practical sense. Plus I didn’t have enough change to make an international call and didn’t know how to do it reverse-charges. I decided instead to sit and wait. I would give him fifteen minutes. That seemed reasonable. He was probably caught in traffic. He had written to me about how impossible London’s traffic had become. One of the reasons he had loved living in Wark, he’d said, was not having to deal with the gridlock.

  I sat on a plastic seat, one of a row of six. A young man with a big cloud of curly hair wearing Jesus sandals was sitting three seats up from me. Dragging my suitcase between my legs, I kept one hand on my carry-on knapsack, which held my passport and wallet. I got Catcher out, but couldn’t concentrate. I read the same line over and over, something about Holden feeling miserable and depressed.

  It wasn’t helping.

  Ten minutes later and I was struggling to keep down the panic. Busting for a piss, I didn’t know how I would manage it with the suitcase. One of the air hostesses, the blonde with false eyelashes, had given me a packet of mints. Wriggling in my seat, I eventually levered them from my pocket. I hoped they would settle my nerves. I fumbled one into my mouth, chewed and swallowed it in seconds. I followed it with another, then another. By the fifteen-minute mark I had nearly finished the pack. They had helped. They’d taken my mind off my bladder, and while chewing them I spotted a payphone near the car rental booth on the opposite wall. I decided Gil had probably forgotten or mixed up the time or day. He had been busy since the Booker; it could easily happen.

  As an act of will in the face of fear, I waited another five minutes, spending the time searching my bag for the black notebook Mum had given me to use as a journal. Inside its front cover, in clear capitals, she had written my emergency numbers: hers, Grandma Madigan’s, two for Gil’s agent, Harold Beason, and one for Celia Dunbar, the only person in England Mum had kept up with (who unfortunately lived in far-off Gloucester).

  I finally relinquished my seat and lugged my bags over to the payphone. Fiddling with the unfamiliar coins, I dialled Nanna Madigan’s number. As it rang, I willed Gil to answer. At least then I would know what was happening. I thought someone had picked up, but it was the connection ringing out. I put the receiver back in its cradle, the coins clattering into the return chamber. I wanted to cry. I didn’t want to ring Harold Beason because I had never met him and I didn’t like the sound of his name. I imagined him wearing a bowler hat. Against reason, I decided to ring my nanna’s number again. This time it only rang twice before somebody answered.

  ‘Hello?’ The voice was weak, distant.

  ‘Hello,’ I echoed. ‘It’s Michael, Michael Madigan speaking. I’m wondering if Gil is there. If I could speak to him.’

  ‘Is that you, Gil? I was wondering where you’d got to.’

  ‘No, it’s Michael here. Is that you, Nanna?’

  There was a long pause at the other end, then when the voice returned it was even weaker, croakier. ‘Why are you calling, dear?’

  All my pent-up anxiety suddenly gushed into the mouthpiece. ‘I’m Michael Madigan,’ I yelled, ‘Gilbert’s son, your grandson. Gil was meant to pick me up. I’m at the airport, waiting. I was …’ In exasperation, I turned from the wall and stared into the middle distance, rhythmically tapping the back of my head against the plasterboard.

  ‘Gilbert’s not … Well, I don’t think …’

  ‘It doesn’t matter, Nanna,’ I said.

  A man was waving to me through the glass. It was Gil, striding along the path. ‘I’ll see you soon,’ I said, and hung up.

  Forgetting Mum’s injunction not to leave my suitcase unattended, I began to trot, then run.

  Gil was flustered too. We embraced, neither of us even pretending to affect an air of composure.

  After the relief came the anger. ‘Where were you?’ I demanded, my throat thick with emotion. ‘I thought you’d forgotten me.’

  Clutching a hand to the back of my head, pulling me into him, he said, ‘I’m sorry, son. I’m so sorry.’

  He went on to explain how he was held up in a meeting and how the traffic was terrible, but I didn’t take any of it in. All was forgiven.

  He had called me his son.

  Driving away from Heathrow, Gil explained that while he was living with Annie in Wark he had rented out his Hampstead house, to the Nigerian novelist Benedict Okposo. Grandad had just died at the time of the breakup, and due to Nanna’s loneliness he had been living with her in Exmouth ever since.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind,’ he said, turning to me, seeking my approval. ‘It’ll be good for you to get to know your grandmother a bit more – she’s looking forward to it. The one bright spot on her horizon.’

  I told him about the phone call and her confusion, and he said that she was not as sharp as she used to be; that his father’s death had knocked her about.

  As the sky outside the windscreen darkened, Gil asked me about school and friends and if any of them were girls. Trying to sound casual, he also asked after Mum. He then changed the topic and told me about the fuss surrounding the prize and how he wished it would go away so that he could get on with his life. ‘The publishers want to parade me like a prize bull at every village fair. I tell them I want to write, but strangely they don’t seem interested in that.’ Af
fecting a plummy, effeminate voice, he hammed, ‘“Your time is now, Gilbert. Your readers want you now!” Of course, most of the punters at these events have never read a word I’ve written.’

  I liked listening to his stories and was glad to be in his company again, but my relief at having been rescued from the airport, combined with the drowsy warmth of the car, conspired against my attempts to stay awake. Gil put on the radio and I drifted towards sleep, aided by the sounds of violins, the murmuring of the engine and the reassuring rhythm of the tyres on the road.

  Nanna Madigan was already in bed when we arrived. Gil showed me round, made me some toast and tea, and set me up in a bedroom on the second floor. Having dozed for so long in the car, I wasn’t able to sleep and stayed up reading Catcher.

  I woke in the morning to the sound of running water. Foggy with jet lag, wondering where I was, what was happening, I opened the bedroom door and followed the sound to the bathroom. The tap over the handbasin was sending a steady stream of hot water down the plughole. No one was about. Turning it off, I walked downstairs.

  I found my nanna sitting alone at the dining room table.

  She looked ancient. Not wanting to frighten her, I coughed as I entered. She continued staring at the teacup in her hand. Clearing my throat, I said hello and approached her for a hug.

  Barely looking up, she said, ‘There you are. A cup of tea?’

  I had never seen much of Gil’s parents, but when I did visit them as a small boy they had always intimidated me. They weren’t horrible, just formal and remote.

  This was different.

  ‘A cup of tea, yes, Nanna. That’d be nice. Thank you.’

  Forgoing the welcoming kiss, I sat opposite her at the table.

  ‘Sleep well?’ she asked, handing me the tea, the china cup jittering in its saucer.

  The tea was cold against my lips. I looked around for Gil. Asked her where he was.