Madeleine (26 page)

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 Morris…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 selling 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:

She would slightly pick an argument with you and then would go on and on and on and she would turn it around and say that you had picked the fight and she would flounce off. She did that with me a couple of times and there would be no communication for weeks or maybe months and then a little postcard through the post saying, shall we meet up? After a while I got used to it so I knew the method.
⁴³

Unless her friends were prepared for a permanent breach, they had to allow Madeleine to control the rhythm of the relationship.

CHAPTER NINETEEN
The Essence and the Booker