The Essence of the Thing
Read The Essence of the Thing Online
Authors: Madeleine St John
PRAISE FOR
The Women in Black
‘Seductive, hilarious, brilliantly observed, this novel
shimmers with wit and tenderness.’
HELEN GARNER
‘A knock-out—ironic, sharp, alive, and then you’re stopped
in your tracks by the warmth of her insights. Australia
as we suddenly remember it…’
JOAN LONDON
‘A major minor masterpiece, a witty and poignant snapshot of
Sydney the year before yesterday.’
BARRY HUMPHRIES
‘This book is like the perfect, vintage little black dress.
It’s beautifully constructed, it evokes another time while
being mysteriously classic and up-to-date, and it makes
you feel happy. I love it.’
KAZ COOKE
‘In
The Women in Black
, Madeleine St John evoked the collision of
modern European history and the still-awakening Australian culture
with an economical intensity that no other writer has quite matched.
The reader could start with any page of her brilliantly compressed
dialogue and realise straight away that this is the work
of an exceptional writer.’
CLIVE JAMES
‘A delicious book. Funny and happy, it’s like
the breath of youth again.’
JANE GARDAM
‘An exquisite novel that has been lost to us for far too long—you’ll
find yourself re-reading it every time you need to be reminded that, in
Camus’ words: Happiness, too, is inevitable.’
DEBORAH ROBERTSON
‘A comic masterpiece…acute, touching and very funny.’
BRUCE BERESFORD
Madeleine St John was born in Sydney. She graduated from Sydney University in
1963
and lived in London for most of the succeeding years, until her death in
2006
. Her novels include
The Women in Black
, 1993,
A Pure Clear Light
, 1996, and
Stairway to Paradise
, 1999.
The Essence of the Thing
is her third novel.
TEXT PUBLISHING MELBOURNE AUSTRALIA
The paper used in this book is manufactured only from wood grown in sustainable regrowth forests.
The Text Publishing Company
Swann House
22 William Street
Melbourne Victoria 3000
Australia
www.textpublishing.com.au
Copyright © Madeleine St John 1997
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons
,
living or dead
,
is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
First published in Great Britain in 1997 by Fourth Estate Limited
This edition published by The Text Publishing Company, 2009
Cover and text design by W.H. Chong
Cover and page illustrations by H.B. Swann
Typeset in 12.5 /18.75 Granjon by J&M Typesetting
Printed and bound by Griffin Press
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
St John, Madeleine, 1941-2006.
The essence of the thing / Madeleine St John.
ISBN: 9781921520921 (pbk.)
Separation (Psychology)--Fiction.
813.914
This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government
through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
For Judith McCue
Contents
Nicola was still standing in the doorway when Jonathan began to speak: she hadn’t had time even to take off her coat. It was a cold spring evening: one still needed a coat out of doors after dark.
She was standing there in the sitting-room doorway, her hands in her pockets, holding onto the packet of cigarettes she had gone out to buy, and the loose change, and the keys; she hadn’t had time even to put these things on the table, and take off her coat, and sit down, because Jonathan had called out to her as soon as she’d shut the front door behind her.
‘Nicola?’
But in a tone of voice which seemed odd to her: too sharp, too urgent: and she’d stood, perplexed, in the doorway, her fingers having suddenly tightened around the cigarettes, the keys, the loose coins: ‘What is it?’ she said.
Is something wrong
?
Jonathan was sitting at the far end of the sofa; he turned his head just enough to enable his eye to catch hers. He gazed at her for a moment and then he spoke again. ‘Come in here,’ he said. ‘I want to talk to you.’
What was he saying? Nicola was paralysed by dread—a dread which in weaker doses had become almost familiar to her during the past few months: now, with this preposterous invitation,
Come in here
(for where else might she have gone?), this ominous announcement,
I want to talk to you
, she saw that something wholly dreadful had at last begun. She saw this, but part of her mind failed truly to grasp it. So she stood, dumbfounded, in the doorway.
‘What is it?’ she asked again. ‘What’s wrong?’
Wrong
is one of those words which sound like what they signify, not by virtue of onomatopoeia, but by virtue of a more subtle correspondence: the same being true, to a lesser degree only, of
right
. There is
right
and there is
wrong
: the knowledge that there is right and wrong is part of one’s English-speaking birthright: these attributes could not imaginably achieve the same terrible finality in another formulation. This is right, said the Anglo-Saxon warrior,
and that is wrong
. And to be in the wrong is to be cast into a waste of ice and darkness which is the
ultima Thule
of devastation. One might nevermore return.
‘Is anything wrong?’ She could see as she uttered the word that something was, indeed,
wrong
. The ice and darkness filled the room.
Jonathan shrugged very slightly and then got impatiently to his feet. He leaned an arm against the mantelpiece; if there had been a fire he would certainly have poked it. As it was, he looked unseeingly at the objects at his elbow and moved a china poodle dog. Then he looked up at her again. ‘There’s no nice way to say this,’ he said. ‘But I’ve decided—that is, I’ve come to the
conclusion
—that we should part.’
The ice and darkness were now inside her: all her entrails froze.
‘I think I’ll sit down,’ she said.
Her entrails had frozen, but her ankles had turned to water. She walked unsteadily over to the sofa and sat down, huddling her coat closer around her. Her hands were still in the pockets, still holding onto the cigarettes, and the loose change, and the keys. She dared not look at him, and yet she knew she must. She saw that Jonathan’s face was a perfectly composed mask of calm assurance.
There was still a part of Nicola’s mind which did not believe that this conversation was really taking place, and so it was possible to enter further into it. It was a sort of joke, it was the sort of joke which might be perpetrated in a dream: in the alternative reality where there was no right, no wrong. There’s nothing wrong, she found herself thinking: this is just a sort of joke which I haven’t yet understood.
‘I don’t think I understand,’ she said. ‘Could you just say all that again?’
