Madeleine (27 page)

Madeleine called her third novel, the ‘Nicola book'. The title had changed from
Little Lambs Eat Parsley
to
Learning to Talk
to become
The Essence of the Thing
by the time Fourth Estate began work on its publication. Christopher Potter liked his new author a great deal and enjoyed their meetings to discuss the manuscript:

It was really about the rhythm and I tried to be sensitive to the fact that with such short words, even minute editing is not insignificant because any slight change sends the wrong idea…She was very pernickety about punctuation and that made it quite interesting [but] I could never tell what she would be absolutely adamant about and what she didn't care about.

Potter respected her subtlety and her certainty. Madeleine never expressed doubt: her books were finished products when she handed them over. Potter saw her as a serious person with a strong spiritual centre. ‘It seemed as if she was here to find something out.'
¹

Madeleine proved a demanding client for Lutyens & Rubinstein, but she was delighted by Sarah, who was so well read and prepared to give a great deal of attention to her newest client. Soon the professional relationship of agent and author became a friendship. The women met for coffee or lunch at Raoul's in Notting Hill, and Madeleine sent postcards almost daily to Sarah or dropped in at the office. They visited each other's homes and went together to the British Film Institute screenings at Southbank, Madeleine becoming angry if Sarah did not appreciate a film.

‘She was incredibly powerful; she made you do things,' Sarah recalled.
²
When Sarah took a trip to Sydney, Madeleine insisted she ride the bus from the city to Watsons Bay, retracing a journey Madeleine knew well. She wanted to know what had happened along the route in the time she had been away. Sarah did the trip, but by car. Back in London, Madeleine was furious that her agent had not followed instructions: Sarah had had the wrong perspective and ruined the entire exercise.

But Madeleine's wit and unique way of looking at the world compensated for her prickliness. She was very fond of Sarah's young son and worried about whether he was receiving the correct musical education. ‘Are you teaching him music? Has he got access to the right kind of music teachers? Are you doing singing with him, are you? How often?' Madeleine hunted down the best guitar teacher in London and insisted Sarah employ him.
³

Sarah and Felicity Rubinstein worried about the precarious finances of their client and sought foreign language publishers for her books. Barry Humphries had written enthusiastically about
The Women in Black
in the
Spectator.
His endorsement would help create interest in the new novels. In May 1997, Felicity sent him a copy of
A Pure Clear Light
and a proof copy of
The Essence of the Thing
. Susannah Godman, a young assistant at Lutyens & Rubinstein, was sent around to Colville Gardens with the books for Madeleine to sign. Felicity wrote to Humphries:

I do hope you will love them as much as you loved her first novel and it would be wonderful if you could mention her in your
Spectator
column around publication time. I can't tell you how thrilled Sarah and I are to have found a fellow fan in you.
⁴

Madeleine was anxious: ‘What if Dame E doesn't like PCL or E of the T? Anything is possible…even life after death,' she wrote to Felicity.
⁵

In August 1997,
The Essence of the Thing
was published. Madeleine dedicated it to Judith McCue. The novel covers an episode in the life of Nicola Gatling, a thirty-something-year-old Londoner working in publishing and living contentedly with Jonathan, a banker. Her life is turned upside down when on an ordinary weekday night, she comes back from a brief outing to buy cigarettes to Jonathan's announcement that their life together is over. The novel is a stand-alone piece but readers of
A Pure Clear Light
were reintroduced to some of the key characters, who play bit parts in the new novel. Madeleine was creating a micro-world in a London populated by members of her fictional ‘family'. Friends and acquaintances in the two books overlap, joined by the thinnest of threads at times, but nonetheless connected. There's even a gentle joke at her own expense in
Essence
: Jonathan hears a radio book reading of ‘some footling tale about some shop assistants in an antipodean department store, fretting about their wombs and their wardrobes and other empty spaces—ye gods!'
⁶

The Essence of the Thing
is perhaps the most autobiographical of Madeleine's novels.
⁷
Its cigarette-smoking heroine of limited financial means, but infinite style and goodness, almost by accident finds domestic happiness with a tall, handsome, phlegmatic man, who suddenly one day ends the thing without explanation.

Whether or not she is drawing on her own experience of men, Madeleine paints an unflattering portrait of her main male character. Jonathan is desirable, but also emotionally ill-equipped and ultimately rather weak, even pathetic. Madeleine may have called on her memories of the disappointing American years for the disjointed, prosaic exchanges that mark the collapse of love. She strikes a perfect note with her dialogue rendering the way people stumble through intimacy or the lack of it. Nicola's friends and family find it hard to empathise with her despair but offer what they can—loyalty, tolerance, love and acceptance.

But the most poignant autobiographical element is the pain—the confusion and agony of rejection, the dullness of life without the Loved One. Once again, Madeleine is interested in the transient, unknown elements of life. The need for religious belief is not as overt as it is in
A Pure Clear
Light
, but the novel is about the need to trust and hope in life itself. It is a micro-canvas, what Christopher Potter, referencing Jane Austen, called a ‘tiny little bit of ivory' pointing to the big moral dilemmas involved in being human. Even if their lives seem ridiculous, her protagonists have a sure, definite line to ‘reckon against' as does every ‘deeply religious person'.
⁸

The Essence of the Thing
attracted limited interest on publication, and Fourth Estate did not put it forward for the 1997 Booker Prize.
⁹
It was the judges who called it in as they assessed what they considered the best novel published in the Commonwealth. It was one of 106 novels read that year by the six-member panel chaired by Cambridge literature don Gillian Beer. The Booker was often controversial, but in 1997 it proved more so than usual. The panel was divided, arguing over whether or not Ian McEwan's
Enduring Love
should be on the shortlist.
¹⁰

When the judges met on 15 September to determine their shortlist, Christopher Potter was on leave at home, keen to know whether Madeleine's book had made the cut. As the afternoon wore on without a phone call from the office, he assumed
Essence
had missed out. It was late in the day when he turned on the radio news to hear the list. He was thrilled.
The Essence of the Thing
was on the shortlist. It was up against Jim Crace's
Quarantine
, Mick Jackson's
The Underground Man
, Bernard MacLaverty's
Grace Notes
, Tim Parks's
Europa
, and Arundhati Roy's
The
God of Small Things
.
Enduring Love
was not on the list.

Fifty-five-year-old Madeleine St John had become the first Australian woman to be shortlisted for the Booker.
Little Lambs Eat Parsley
a.k.a.
Learning to Talk
a.k.a.
The Essence of the Thing
had prevailed. The Booker Prize was £20,000 that year but Potter knew it would be worth much more to Madeleine and Fourth Estate, delivering status as well as sales and transforming Madeleine's career. At her home in Chalk Farm, Esther Whitby took calls from former colleagues at Andre Deutsch, congratulating her for the part she had played in discovering the latest Booker candidate. Fourth Estate organised a reprint of 15,000 copies of
The Essence of the Thing
, and the press in London and Australia started asking questions about this unknown author with the plummy name.

In Sydney it was the middle of the night, too late for the news to make the morning papers, but perfect for radio. At the ABC, producers hurried to find people to reminisce about their old university contemporary. Actor John Bell hadn't seen Madeleine since their days in campus repertory, but he was called upon for comment, nonetheless.
¹¹
In their homes across Sydney, the extended St John family found their phones running hot as friends and relatives called to exclaim upon Madeleine's news. A friend telephoned Colette's home on the northern beaches, but she had already left for work. Eleven-year-old Aaron took the call and scrawled a note for his mother before he dashed off to school: ‘Mumma, my Aunt Madeleine has won a book prize.'
¹²
A day later the Australian papers carried stories about the expatriate who had started to write in middle age and was now shortlisted for one of the most prestigious prizes for literature in the English-speaking world. The
Australian
turned most of its features page over to the story, which included a phone interview with Madeleine by Luke Slattery. Madeleine gave him only five minutes, most of it filled with elliptical self-deprecation that must have left readers wondering what she was on about. ‘It's mad. They'll all read it just because it's being talked about. Quite mad,' she announced as she sought to downplay her excitement. Slattery talked at length to Colleen Chesterman, who said her friend was unlikely to see herself as an Australian success story.
¹³

The
Sydney Morning Herald
began its coverage on page one, with a large photograph of Madeleine. Christopher Henning, the paper's London correspondent, wrote that the author was ‘gob smacked…stunned… appalled' by the Booker fuss. He quoted Madeleine: ‘These lists, let's face it…there are squillions of books out there. Who knows what the best six are? With the best will in the world, with the best-chosen judges in the world, it all comes down to a personal taste thingy. It is to such a degree a matter of luck. It's not about me being brilliant. It's about me being lucky.' Even so, she told the
Herald,
she wished Miss Medway, her principal at Queenwood, ‘could see this'. And what of the publicity whirl she had been thrust into? ‘No, I hate it. I have not had my first cup of coffee, so I am probably going a bit barmy. I could get to enjoy it, but I don't want to. I know it isn't going to last.'
¹⁴
The
Herald
tracked down Chris Tillam but he said little about the woman who had divorced him thirty years earlier. The paper found Colette at Palm Beach and she was more expansive, claiming that a major contribution to Madeleine's writing was her dysfunctional relationship with Ted. Their father, she said, had inflicted an ‘enormous amount of pain and suffering'. The paper convinced Ed St John to write a personal piece about his half-sister. Ed had worked as a music journalist and TV producer and was now the CEO of Warner Music Australia. He wrote a fair and honest account of Madeleine, pointing out that he did not really know her:

I knew her once, but not now. It's hard to explain how familial relationships can deteriorate to a point where people cannot or will not speak to each other, but that is what has occurred. Three years ago, the blood link that joined us was severed by the death of our father. Madeleine and Dad always had a very stormy relationship, one that came to a grinding impasse some time before he died, but it's ultimately for him that I am writing this.

Ed noted that his father loved writers and writing and would have been ‘immensely proud' of Madeleine's Booker shortlisting. He told of her visit to Australia when he was a teenager:

To an impressionable teenager, the Madeleine of the late '70s was a hugely fascinating figure: exotic, mysterious, worldly. She didn't actually appear to do anything, but she did nothing with an immense amount of style and great humour. It was always said, at family dinners, that Madeleine wrote a brilliant letter (and she did). It was accepted as an article of faith that it was a Great Shame she had never put her talents to good use.

Now she had emerged as an author. ‘As she would put it herself, it's a bizarre twist to a peculiar life,' the piece concluded.
¹⁵

Ed's article was generous without avoiding the complexities of Madeleine's relationship with her family. Annabel Minchin rang Madeleine. The conversation began well but deteriorated when Annabel mentioned the piece. Madeleine fumed. ‘She said something like, “Your complete insensitivity is breathtaking but only what I would expect from an Australian.” It was incomprehensible to her that I would call her and tell her [about Ed's piece]', Annabel recalled.
¹⁶

In London, Madeleine gave a series of interviews. Journalists trooped up to her flat for cups of tea and brief histories of the expat as novelist—not that she was easy to squeeze into the stereotype of the Australian abroad.

In the
Age,
Andrew Clark picked up on the theme of Madeleine's dysfunctional family in childhood and described Ted St John as ‘a remote martinet' at home.
¹⁷

In the
Herald
, Christopher Henning wrote a second, longer piece noting Madeleine's strenuous efforts to be fair to Ted. ‘Problematical says it all. I can add nothing to that. It is a complete description,' she said. When Henning asked if the relationship had given her anything, Madeleine laughed and said:

I've always been so conscious of what it took away. I've never actually thought of what it might have given me. No, before he got problematical—in my view—my father gave me lots of stuff. He really did adore books and turned me on to great books when I was very tiny. After he got problematical…really I don't think one can know. My assumption is that you learn more from being happy than being unhappy, but I would say that, wouldn't I?
¹⁸