The Women in Black Read online

  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. ZIt’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

  ‘The Women in Black is as sparkling as an aperitif of cold champagne, as layered as a tiered skirt of white organza.

  It’s a national treasure.’

  TONI JORDAN

  ‘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. Those of us who knew her at Sydney University back in the late 1950s are still trying to forgive ouselves that we never guessed what she would become. Now that The Women in Black is back in print, we can confidently predict that it will never be out of print again.’

  CLIVE JAMES

  ‘A delicious book. Funny and happy, it’s like the breath of youth again.’

  JANE GARDAM

  ‘A pocket masterpiece, a jewel.’

  HILARY MANTEL

  ‘Madeleine St John has a wicked eye for the domestic details of suburban life and a delicate ear for dialogue. Sharp, enjoyable and as redolent of the 1950s as a jar of Pond’s cold cream.’

  THE TIMES

  ‘A delicious meringue that I devoured in one sitting. Wry, whimsical, wistful and touching.’

  LEE TULLOCH

  ‘I finished The Women in Black with a rare feeling that I remember from reading when I was a child: I wished the story and everyone in it were real. In a nation where comic talent is so often spent on scorn or ridicule, Madeleine St John stands alone in her embrace of humanity, her funny, subtle eye lighting up the cracks in people where goodness is just waiting to burst through. 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 little gem…shot through with old-fashioned innocence and sly humour.’

  VOGUE

  ‘Brimming with elegance, uncannily modern and sparkling with mischief.’

  ZOË FOSTER

  ‘A highly sophisticated work, full of funny, sharp and subtle observations…a small masterpiece.’

  SHENA MACKAY, SUNDAY TIMES

  ‘A comic masterpiece…acute, touching and very funny.’

  BRUCE BERESFORD

  THE WOMEN IN BLACK

  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. The Women in Black is her first novel. She also wrote A Pure Clear Light, 1996, The Essence of the Thing, 1997, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and Stairway to Paradise, 1999.

  Bruce Beresford is one of Australia’s best known film and opera directors. His films include The Getting of Wisdom, Driving Miss Daisy and Breaker Morant.

  Christopher Potter published the novels of Madeleine St John at Fourth Estate. He is the author of You Are Here.

  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 1993

  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.

  Copyright © Bruce Beresford, Madeleine and Me

  Copyright © Christopher Potter, Obituary Madeleine St John 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 1993 by Andre Deutsch

  This edition published byThe Text Publishing Company 2009

  Cover and text design by W.H. Chong

  Typeset in 12.5/18.75 Granjon by W.H. Chong

  Cover illustration by H.B. Swann

  Printed and bound by Griffin Press

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

  St. John, Madeleine.

  The women in black / Madeleine St John.

  ISBN 9781921520204 (pbk.)

  A823.3

  This book is dedicated to the memory of

  M. & Mme. J. M. Cargher

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  Madeleine and Me,

  by Bruce Beresford

  The Women in Black

  OBITUARY

  Madeleine St John,

  by Christopher Potter

  Bruce Beresford

  Madeleine and Me

  Nineteen-sixty was my first year as an indifferent student at Sydney University. In pursuit of the prettiest girls I joined the Sydney University Players where I was an even more indifferent actor, easily outclassed by the stars of the era—who included John Bell, John Gaden, Germaine Greer, Arthur Dignam, Clive James and Robert Hughes.

  Madeleine St John (she pronounced the name ‘Synjin’, though I understand her family preferred the standard ‘Saint John’) was to be found backstage, helping with the costumes and props. Definitely not one of the university’s glamour girls, she still managed to be striking. Tiny and with rusty-red hair, she always reminded me of a sparrow with her darting movements, her beak-like nose, her inquisitive eyes. Her odd appearance contrived to prevent her performing in anything other than minor theatrical roles, although she was cast, rather mendaciously I thought, in a revue, Dead Centre, in which she appeared, singing, dancing and dressed in red crepe, as Lola Montez.

  I can recall only a couple of conversations with her—all vague now (forty-eight years later!)—including one where she expressed a passion for the poetry of Thomas Hardy. I distinctly remember being so in awe of her wide reading—‘are you really unaware of the work of Gwen Raverat and Djuna Barnes?’—her forthrightness and her wit, that, in order to prevent my self-esteem plummeting, I took evasive action. The factor which distinguished her from virtually all of our contemporaries was that she was the daughter of a famous father, Edward St John, a prominent QC and Liberal politician, though if father or family was mentioned she immediately made it clear the subject was taboo.

  I left for England in 1963 and lost track of Madeleine for thirty years. My attempts at establishing myself as a film director slowly met with some success. One day, in 1993, I was having lunch with Clive James, by now an internationally known critic and poet, when he mentioned that a novel he’d just read, The Women in Black, was by our old university colleague, Madeleine St John—and was a comic masterpiece. I bought a copy immediately, agreed with Clive’s assessment, and called the publisher for Madeleine
’s number.

  She was cordial and cheery over the phone, said she’d seen a number of my films over the years and was delighted I wanted to film her novel.

  A few days later I went to see her. She was living in a large apartment on the top fl oor of a council house building in Notting Hill. The area had been derelict but was now being gentrified. Madeleine must have qualified for rent assistance some years previously and there was no indication that her financial situation had improved. The furnishing was basic, the most striking items being a number of well-thumbed paperbacks and a vicious white cat, which snarled and clawed the air whenever it considered I had approached too close to its mistress.

  She seemed to have become even smaller, the rusty-red hair maintained its aura with bottled assistance and she was almost permanently attached to an oxygen tank with a long tube—the result of emphysema. She was as sharp-tongued as ever and tartly dismissed my query about whether it was advisable to smoke so heavily with such a condition. She was happy to talk at length about literature, classical music and jazz. Her opinions, as always, were firm and precise—contemporary novelists being airily dismissed as a bunch of parvenus. Mitsuko Uchida, she insisted, was the finest classical pianist and Art Tatum the greatest jazz pianist. Personal information was much harder to obtain, though I found out that she had married Chris Tillam, a fellow student from Sydney, in 1965. They had lived in San Francisco for a few years, where he studied film. Once his course was completed they decided to go to London. Madeleine went on ahead but ‘he never arrived’. She made no further comments, so I gathered he had met another lady—and that was the end of the marriage.

  She refused to discuss her Australian relatives, just as she had back at university, although she made vague references to their

  ‘ill-treatment’ of her. Subsequent meetings with a couple of charming members of her family, in Australia, have led me to believe that Madeleine never recovered, while still in high school, from the shock of the death, by suicide, of her mother. She then created a cast of evil relations who had accepted her father’s re-marriage.

  In the late 1960s, following her alleged abandonment by her husband, she lived around London in a number of apartments, sharing with various Australian university friends. To the astonishment of some she fell under the influence of a dubious Indian mystic, Swami Ji, and for a couple of years adopted Indian clothes and assumed an Indian name.

  She supported herself with odd jobs, mostly in bookshops and an antique shop in the West End, although she tried to vary this routine by applying, at one point, and unsuccessfully, for a position as Kenneth Tynan’s secretary. It was not until sometime in 1991 that Madeleine decided to write a book herself, convinced, she told me, she could do at least as well as the authors of so many of the books she was selling. She was fifty-two when The Women in Black was published in 1993 and it is the only one of her four novels to be set in Australia. It is difficult not to see Madeleine herself in the clever and sensitive young heroine, Lesley Miles, though the well observed lower middle-class family background she describes with such affection was certainly not her own, as she grew up in the smart suburb of Castlecrag, on Sydney’s North Shore. It is probable that she appropriated the family of her university friend, Colleen Olliffe, who lived in a modest suburb.

  Colleen’s father, like Mr Miles, was in the printing business but did not have the rather austere personality of Madeleine’s father.

  The novel was clearly set in a fictionalised version of the David Jones department store in Elizabeth Street, Sydney. The interplay of the saleswomen (who dressed in black in 1960, when the novel is set, just as they do now) is so convincing, so comprehensively realised, that I assumed Madeleine had a holiday job there while a student, but she insisted this was not the case, ‘although I often went shopping there with my mother’.

  Madeleine’s subsequent novels, A Pure Clear Light, The Essence of the Thing (nominated for the Booker) and Stairway to Paradise, are, I think, equally superb—though none have the warmth and pervasive good humour of The Women in Black—and mark her as a major writer. The palette is small, but the observation and the dialogue acute, touching and often very funny. A fastidious stylist, whose model was Jane Austen, she created, or re-created, a section of late twentieth-century London society in a manner similar to Austen’s world of the nineteenth century. I remain astonished at the fidelity with which Madeleine captured the manners and mores of the middle-class English as I was never aware that she knew many of these people. I assume that her years working in bookshops introduced them to her and her interpretive genius took over from there.

  If Madeleine’s social circle was not wide, there were a number of devoted friends who seemed to be able to cope with her changes of mood, her demands and general waspishness. Perhaps her fervent Christianity, acquired sometime after she dispensed with Swami Ji, supplied her with a moral code that meant she often found others wanting. At some point most friends and relatives were cast off.

  A few managed a comeback but many, especially relatives, were in permanent outer darkness. Agents and publishers were almost saintly in the way they dealt with Madeleine’s tantrums, her obsession with detail. She was aware, I realise, that a major strength of her writing was the accumulation of minutiae. She was so furious over some minor point in a French translation of one of her novels that she refused to allow it to appear. Kamikaze-like, she stipulated in her will that there were to be no translations of her novels into any language.

  With a terrible sense of foreboding I sent her the screenplay of The Women in Black, written by Sue Milliken and myself. To my surprise, astonishment rather, she made no comment other than saying she looked forward to seeing the film. Perhaps she felt that if I could make a success of the intimate character studies of Driving Miss Daisy and Tender Mercies then I could do it again with her novel. It must have been a struggle, but she kept her reservations, and I can’t believe they were not numerous, to herself.

  Unlike so many of Madeleine’s friends and associates I escaped being sent to Siberia—probably because I was only in London occasionally, was a link with university days (she enjoyed talking about our contemporaries) and shared Madeleine’s interest in music.

  We even managed a visit to the Royal Albert Hall to hear Mitsuko Uchida play the Schumann Piano Concerto. Somehow, I engineered Madeleine down four fl ights of stairs in Notting Hill into a taxi, and then, complete with large oxygen cylinder, into a box near the stage. On another occasion, I arranged to take her to dinner at the Ivy so that she could meet an American film-maker she admired,

  Whit Stillman—the writer-director of three witty character-driven films dealing with middle-class Americans, The Last Days of Disco, Metropolitan and Barcelona. Whit, a handsome young man, was polite but clearly bewildered by this tiny person with dyed red hair, an oxygen cylinder, and forceful opinions. I also introduced her to my son, Adam, then a classics student at Balliol, and found myself somewhat bored as they discussed, at length, Adam’s theory as to the identity of Shakespeare’s Mr W.H. Madeleine assured Adam he had no idea what he was talking about.

  Madeleine was always capable of surprising me. Her wild enthusiasm for the TV series Buffy, the Vampire Slayer seemed to me totally out of character. I found a few episodes on DVD and failed, still fail, to see why this nonsense would have interested her. But then I have all of Willie Nelson’s discs and my friends can’t equate that with my passion for opera.

  On one of my visits to London, a year or so before Madeleine died, there was no answer at the flat, so I feared the worst. Through her former literary agent, Sarah Lutyens, I tracked her down in a hospital on the Kings Road. She was in a surprisingly stylish public ward with a TV set suspended over the bed and numerous tubes connecting her to all sorts of sci-fimachines. Never one to complain about her unenviable health she remained cheerful. She enjoyed meeting the other patients and nurses and hearing the stories of their lives. She told me her blood count.

  ‘Is that good?’ I a
sked.

  ‘My doctor says that for me it’s very good,’ she replied. ‘If it was anyone else they’d be dead.’

  That was the last time I saw her. We spoke on the phone a few more times, then an email arrived, in June 2006, saying she had died. She must have been bitterly disappointed that I had directed numerous other scripts but not The Women in Black, but affected indifference. She also minimised the acclaim she had received for The Essence of the Thing, although it cannot fail to have meant a lot to her.

  On her desk was a hundred pages or so of a new novel—a few typed but many in longhand and unnumbered. With the help of Sarah Lutyens the pages were arranged in their probable correct order. There are many characteristically witty and touching scenes, but the manuscript is too fragmentary for publication. Her will left her modest estate, as well as future royalties from her books, to charity. I was named her literary executor, in addition to which she left me a charming drawing, by Bernard Hesling, of the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. Various friends shared out her modest collection of books.

  The angry cat was no problem as it had predeceased her.

  1

  At the end of a hot November day Miss Baines and Mrs Williams of the Ladies’ Frocks Department at Goode’s were complaining to each other while they changed out of their black frocks before going home.

  ‘Mr Ryder’s not so bad,’ said Miss Baines, in reference to the fl oor manager; ‘it’s that Miss Cartright who’s a pain in the neck, excuse my French.’

  Miss Cartright was the buyer, and she never seemed to give them a moment’s peace.

  Mrs Williams shrugged and began to powder her nose.

  ‘She always gets worse at this time of the year,’ she pointed out. ‘She wants to make sure we earn our Christmas bonus.’

  ‘As if we could help it!’ said Miss Baines. ‘We’re run off our feet!’

  Which was quite true: the great festival being now only six weeks away, the crowds of customers were beginning to surge and the frocks to vanish from the rails in an ever-faster fl urry, and when Mrs Williams was washing out her undies in the handbasin that night she had a sudden sensation that her life was slipping away with the rinsing water as it gurgled down the plughole; but she pulled herself together and went on with her chores, while the Antipodean summer night throbbed outside all around her.