by Helen Trinca
I mean the whole situation was a fuckup, & need not have been. Waste. Oh dear.15
Madeleine had spent much of her life swamped by negative emotions towards her father. At times, she had been circumspect in public; at times she hoped for Ted’s approval; at times she had managed civility, even warmth towards him. But now, at fifty-three, Madeleine was, if not pleased, certainly relieved that Ted St John was dead.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
A Moment in the Sunshine
Madeleine was enjoying her new status as a published author. The Women in Black had sold few copies, but it represented a huge leap forward for Madeleine after decades scraping together an existence in council housing without a career and without a literary circle. Now, with agent Sarah Lutyens and her editor and friend Esther Whitby, she felt part of a wider world and was optimistic about building a life as a writer.
The Women in Black opened doors that had been closed since the sixties. Clive James had no difficulty remembering Madeleine when he read The Women in Black soon after it was published. He thought the book was a comic masterpiece1 and recommended the novel to his old flatmate Bruce Beresford, now an established film director. Bruce was intrigued. He read it, loved it and bought the film rights—although a film was never made. Madeleine splashed out and bought several cashmere sweaters with the money.2 Clive James recalled:
At least I can tell myself that I found the book, loved it and recommended it to Bruce, who at one stage had Monica Bellucci attached to the project [of the film].3
Bruce Beresford had not been particularly close to Madeleine at university although she recalled that ‘unlike a lot of the blokes around that place [he was] a perfect poppet. He never teased you.’4 Now they discovered they shared an interest in classical music and jazz as well as literature, and, over the next few years, Bruce visited Madeleine whenever he was in London. He enjoyed her company, but found her hostile towards Australia, a stance he felt was directly due to her feelings towards her father.5
Madeleine cut ties with Australia when she became a British citizen in 1995. But she was concerned about Colette and Aaron, and in September she embarked on her first trip home in fifteen years. Colette and Aaron met her at Sydney airport. Colette burst into tears, but Madeleine found the display of emotion difficult and backed away from her sister’s embrace. Colette fretted that there were ‘so many conversations’ she could not have with Madeleine about their past.6 Madeleine did not visit Val or her half-brothers. She saw Pom Jarvis, her daughter Jonette and her granddaughter Siobhan. She had the cachet of being a published author and she counselled Siobhan to wait till she was much older before she attempted to write and then to write something humorous because there were already too many serious books in the world.7
In Sydney, Madeleine had dinner with her cousins Antony and Annabel Minchin and Antony’s wife, Eliza. It was an enjoyable evening, but Madeleine could not refrain from insulting some of their guests.8 She had high expectations of others’ behaviour, but could often be very rude herself. Colleen and Michael Chesterman, who regularly saw her when they visited London, held a dinner in her honour at their Paddington terrace house. Madeleine was rather grand, performing for her old university friends in the role of author.9
The visit to Australia rekindled Madeleine’s interest in the St John family history. Back in London, she wrote to Antony to thank him for some family photographs:
Many, many thanks for the photographs—it’s super to have them. I’m entirely fascinated by the story-of-the-forebears (which I find utterly tragic & awful & romantic & ridiculous and whatever else you’ve got) so any snippet you come across, do tell me or if no appalling hassle—send me a copy.10
A few years earlier, Ted’s brother Roland had written a memoir, Memories at Sunset, which touched on his early life at school and in the vicarage. Madeleine read the unpublished manuscript and was excited about recovering the memories of Quirindi. She wrote to Antony:
I’ve been thinking that we ought each to write down what we remember about it and its inhabitants…those recollections…might make quite a nice (amazing, bizarre, unique) record for all those other (zillion) descendants who are so much further from it.11
But Madeleine’s focus was on the micro-world of Notting Hill and inner London. She had been productive, given that she had turned to fiction only four or five years earlier. The procrastination of the past had evaporated. After Andre Deutsch accepted The Women in Black for publication she wrote a second novel but discarded it. ‘I knew I would have to write it in order to get to the stage where I could write one that worked,’ she said later.12 Then she wrote a novel that she felt was ‘much too short’, and then another that was also ‘too short’. But she was ‘horribly pleased’ with that one. Both of the complete but unpublished novels were ‘about 90s London…& extremely politically incorrect’.13 They were written as Madeleine experienced the rapture and despair of being in love. An infatuation with a younger man, a neighbour who attended All Saints, had ended in tears and Madeleine looked back in anger and amazement at having allowed herself to be—in her terms, at least—badly treated. She confided in Judith McCue, who recalled later:
He was a neighbour and they often exchanged pleasantries. She would watch him come and go from her window…Madeleine became hopelessly infatuated with him but, as much as she fantasised about him, she never indicated to me that there was any reason for her to expect more than a platonic friendship. She was, however, heartbroken when he seemed to cut her dead and turned up in church (after being away a while, I think) with young woman in tow. To her, this was a sort of betrayal or disloyalty.14
Sarah Lutyens began looking for a publisher for one of the two completed novels. Madeleine had originally called it Little Lambs Eat Parsley,15 a version of ‘liddle lamzy divey’ (little lambs eat ivy) from the 1943 novelty song, ‘Mairzy Doats’.16 One of the characters in the novel sings the rhyme as a lullaby. Sarah felt the title was unappealing. She renamed it Learning to Talk, and she sent it to Andre Deutsch as required under Madeleine’s earlier contract, although Madeleine made it clear she would not stay with the publisher; Esther Whitby had left the firm in unhappy circumstances and Madeleine probably felt some loyalty on that score. Tom Rosenthal, publisher at Andre Deutsch, rejected Learning to Talk, telling Sarah by letter that, while ‘we have all read [the book] with much joy, we all also feel that it isn’t a sufficient advance on the first book that we ought to offer blandishments to her to persuade her to stay with us against her declared will’.17
Other publishers were hesitant. Hodder and Stoughton rejected the manuscript, Carole Welch writing: ‘It’s well written and constructed and both marvellously and horribly true to life, but in the end I just felt it was too slight and not one I could get others excited about.’18 Penguin UK’s editorial director, Fanny Blake, wrote:
Nearly, but not quite I’m afraid. I like a lot of this but felt that it needed more tables and chairs. Too much dialogue and not enough narrative. As it stands, I think it is a little too slight for us to publish without it getting lost, so I am afraid I’m going to have to pass.19
Jonathan Burnham at Chatto & Windus found it ‘well-paced and entertaining, with some very nice descriptive touches, but…’20 Doubleday’s Joanna Goldsworthy deemed it ‘very precise in its portrayal of relationships, and it’s wonderfully witty too. But it’s such a slender piece, a novella almost, that we feel it would get lost on our list.’21
With a clutch of rejections, Sarah changed her strategy and sent both novels into the market as a double act. Suddenly, two publishers were interested in Learning to Talk and A Private View. Robin Baird-Smith at Constable made an offer for both, but Sarah decided to go with Christopher Potter at Fourth Estate. In a fax to Sarah, Potter said:
I’d be absolutely thrilled if I were to become Madeleine St John’s publisher. I can see Fourth Estate publishing these novels particularly well alongside E. Annie Proulx, Carol Shields and my most recent acquisition, Mary McGarry Mo
rris…Ours is a small list of novels; novels that we love passionately and which everyone in the company reads.22
He offered Madeleine an advance of £5000 for each book. She was delighted, and took Felicity Baker to a celebratory lunch at a restaurant near the British Museum. Madeleine was very formal, very well dressed and a little ‘grand’. She was showing off. Felicity took flowers, which she knew Madeleine would appreciate. But over lunch, Madeleine revealed she had been diagnosed with emphysema. Her GP had told her that unless she gave up smoking she would be dead in two weeks.23 Madeleine was prone to exaggerate and the prognosis was probably less extreme, but she was already struggling for breath at times. She continued to smoke, and her respiratory condition gradually worsened.
Being taken on by Fourth Estate was an important development for Madeleine. Potter had a reputation for discovering ‘sleepers’ that became bestsellers, and Fourth Estate, an independent house founded in 1984 by Victoria Barnsley, was a stylish and innovative company. Potter had success in the early 1990s with books such as Longitude by Dava Sobel, Fermat’s Last Theorem by Simon Singh, and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby. Potter told Sarah that he would prefer to publish A Private View ahead of Learning to Talk, but that he was not particularly worried about the sequence.24
But the titles were still not right. Madeleine wrote to Sarah suggesting Learning to Talk be called Real Tears and A Private View become A Pure Clear Light.25 The latter title is from ‘Jesus Bids Us Shine’, the nineteenth-century children’s hymn written by Susan Warner:
Jesus bids us shine
With a pure, clear light
Like a little candle
Burning in the night.
In this world of darkness
So let us shine—
You in your small corner
And I in mine…26
The title crystallised the religious themes in the book and the notion that holding fast to an individual, even childlike, faith may be our only hope in a transitory and unknowable world.
Potter began work on publishing his new author. He held back Learning to Talk, the book rejected by Andre Deutsch and others, and published A Pure Clear Light early in 1996.
Set among the thrusting professional class of 1990s London, A Pure Clear Light is, at one level, a story of an affair that shakes a happy, if unexciting, marriage. Simon’s sexual desire runs parallel to his wife Flora’s search for meaning in religion. Both obsessions threaten the marriage, but Madeleine suggests that both sex and religion are central to the human need for permanence in an uncertain world.
Infidelity had been an issue for Madeleine since her fears that Chris had had an affair at Harvard. Three decades later she had a more nuanced view of fidelity—she had experienced broken relationships and intense infatuations—and A Pure Clear Light reflects that complexity.
Reviewer Peter Craven called A Pure Clear Light a ‘book about the search for truth’. He thought the novel superior to The Women in Black, noting that Madeleine was ‘swifter and neater…when she turned from the remembrance of a long-ago Australia to contemporary London’.27 The Times gave the novel a good review, highlighting its big themes. Madeleine wrote to Antony Minchin: ‘The only problem is that I don’t like the review although other people seem to think it’s a good one. I just think it is peculiar—it makes the book (poor little book!) sound so desperately serious…as if I would! People are just so odd.’28
Madeleine had told friends over the years that she never wanted to write serious books and she never drew on her personal grief in her writing. But A Pure Clear Light is no mere comedy of manners. The novel is filled with the world Madeleine knew in Notting Hill. Lydia decorates her flat almost as Madeleine decorated Colville Gardens:
The walls were all painted a sort of greyish-lilac, with cream woodwork, and the floor was covered with some sort of seagrass matting. Cream calico curtains, hanging to the floor; a deck-chair with a white canvas seat; a glass coffee table—its legs seemed to be to be made of glass too; they must be perspex…29
The novel draws on Madeleine’s religious practice and her need for faith in trying to make sense of her world. Flora’s dalliance with religion reflects Madeleine’s involvement at All Saints and her belief in a spiritual answer to life’s problems. Sarah Lutyens recalled that Madeleine ‘believed incredibly powerfully in the moral compass of Christianity’, although she was ‘so unchurchy and so worldly’. She had a strong belief, without the ‘cant’.30
Madeleine dedicated A Pure Clear Light to Colette, perhaps to honour her, perhaps to send her younger sister a message about how to live. Madeleine may well have intended parallels between her sexually attractive sister and Gillian Selkirk, the mistress in the novel, and between herself and Lydia, the keeper of moral integrity. Madeleine was often highly critical of Colette. She had not approved of her behaviour in London and Ibiza in the 1960s, and later in life she described Colette as an ‘Ibiza hustler [with] lots of drugs and lots of rich boyfriends’.31 Throughout their adult life, Madeleine and Colette had had a rocky relationship, and it is possible to see Madeleine’s view of those tensions in her second novel.
When A Pure Clear Light was published, Madeleine decided she could afford to leave her ‘adorable’ Saturday-morning job at Stockspring. She wrote to Antony that she was ‘seen off with a magnificent dinner party, v. English with snowy white damask & antique wineglasses, flowing claret & etc—11 of us around the long thin table incl. une française, un espagnol 2 colonial (incl. me) and the rest Brits and all perfectly lovely’.32 The group included Robert and Georgina McPherson and Jane Holdsworth and her partner, Bob Newman.
Madeleine organised a night at the English National Opera with six of her chums from Kensington Church Street. It was an avant-garde production of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde and Madeleine told Antony that it had been ‘extraordinary! Espec sitting in the gods as we were—excruciatingly uncomfortable, but one must suffer for Art.’33 She was enjoying her late-in-life success, truly happy in the glow of A Pure Clear Light. But Robert McPherson recalled that Madeleine had been difficult, determined to ‘educate’ her friends:
[It] was all in black and white and no one liked it and it was three and a half hours and we were dying to go and she was enthralled… all we could do was think about food…She told us off for not liking Wagner, we were all peasants…I remember a brief interlude and we could stuff our little faces with ice-cream.34
Madeleine loved the opera and the farewell dinner and told Antony: ‘So that is (v. untypically for me!) Life in London—dinner parties & operas & that sort of thing. In fact, Life as it ought to be, all the time, for all of us, I say.’35
When Father Alex Hill arrived at All Saints as a curate in 1997, parishioners told him Madeleine had written a novel about them.36 Madeleine gave him a copy of A Pure Clear Light with the inscription, Ecclesia Anglorum Mater Sanctorum—Church of the English, Mother of the Saints.
Alex was far more High Church than Madeleine and the two of them debated theology. He felt that Madeleine was delighted when he married, seeing it as proof he could not have been quite so High Church given that he had chosen a wife rather than celibacy.37 He saw her as an introvert who paraded as an extrovert. She was hard to put in a box. ‘In her company you never noticed anything else but Madeleine, or perhaps her horrendous cat. She held court, and like a lot of small people she overcompensated.’38 The cat was Puck. He was viciously protective of Madeleine, and visitors kept their distance.
Madeleine had a life she could not have imagined a decade earlier. She was more content than at any time, and had settled into a chatty correspondence with her St John cousins in Australia. In May 1997 she wrote to Annabel Minchin thanking her for a press cutting about the sale of the Souhami’s Walter Burley Griffin house in Castlecrag after Friedel’s death in October 1996. Madeleine wrote:
Dear Annabel, Thank you so much for the cutting on the Souhami house—naturally I was fascinated & rather sad at Renate’s sell
ing it—you’d have thought they might have kept it in the family; she did have 2 sons, I suppose she still has. Sic transit mundi, as usual.
She said she was saddened by the marriage breakdown of another cousin. Annabel too was divorced, and Madeleine chided them gently: ‘Please girls, be warned by me: the single life has its sorrows. It isn’t all white pussycats & sleeping in as late as you like and eating chocolate biscuits instead of cooking proper meals. (As you may have found.)’39
For Madeleine, in fact, there was a good deal of sleeping in late. And in the afternoons she stretched out on the lounge with Puck and watched movies on television. She consumed popular culture and even enjoyed Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Perhaps she identified with Buffy’s desire to control her world and her statement, ‘The hardest thing in his world is to live in it.’40 Madeleine loved Clueless, the 1995 Hollywood teen comedy broadly based on Jane Austen’s Emma. ‘Laugh? We nearly died,’ she wrote to Judith McCue.41
Madeleine spent a considerable amount of time alone, rolling her fags, eating like a bird, listening to talk on Radio 4 and music on Radio 5. She watched the tennis.42 And she listened to news, though she was not greatly interested in politics. She found people intriguing—even if she found it hard to get along with them.
In these later years, her capacity both to charm and to wound her friends became even more apparent. Jane Holdsworth found Madeleine ‘unforgettable’ but also intense, with a habit of focusing so much emotional attention on you that it was difficult to remain impassive. But Jane grew wise to Madeleine’s manipulation: