The Women in Black (18 page)
55
‘My very best wishes,’ said Miss Cartright.
‘May I wish you both every happiness,’ said Mr Ryder.
Fay smiled ecstatically. She held out her left hand for the customary inspection.
‘Lovely,’ said Miss Cartright. ‘A sapphire. Lovely!’
‘A very handsome sparkler,’ said Mr Ryder.
‘Well I never,’ said Miss Jacobs. ‘A whirlwind courtship, with a Hungarian. I never! I hope you’ll both be very happy.’
Lisa looked at the ring and at Fay. How perfectly astounding it all was. Even she had known Rudi longer than Fay had. How mysterious adult life was after all: she was not now sure that she could have understood what it might all really be about. That Rudi and Fay were now so suddenly engaged to be married—well, it was an event whose preceding stages she could not even guess at. To ascribe the whole process to the operation of love explained nothing. Here however it was, and Fay certainly looked divinely happy.
It was Thursday, which was pay-day, and the announcement had been in the personal column of the morning paper where it had been spotted by Mrs Miles at the breakfast table.
‘Fay Baines,’ she said. ‘Don’t you work with a Fay Baines, Lisa?’
She was getting quite good now at saying Lisa instead of Lesley. Lisa was so startled at the idea of Rudi and Fay being an engaged couple that she forgot to take the contents of her money box with her, and would have to take delivery of Lisette on the following day. On Thursday night she came home with her pay-packet and taking out her money box she sat on her bed and counted all her money. She counted out exactly £36.15.0 and put it in an envelope. Tomorrow Lisette would be hers.
On Friday morning Fay waylaid her in the Staff Locker Room.
‘Oh, Lisa, I’ve got something here for you from Rudi,’ she said.
‘From Rudi?’ asked the astonished girl.
‘Yes, he asked me to apologise for not congratulating you sooner on your results,’ said Fay, ‘but he said he hoped you’d understand and forgive him in the circumstances. We’ll see you on Saturday night at Magda’s, won’t we? He asked me to give you this, to celebrate your results.’
She handed Lisa a package which Lisa opened immediately. It was a large box of expensive chocolates tied with pink ribbon. Lisa gasped.
‘Oh, please thank him for me. No one’s
ever
given me chocolates before! They’re beautiful! Would you like one?’
‘No, that’s all right,’ said Fay. ‘It’s a bit early in the day for me.’
They both laughed.
‘It’s awfully nice of him,’ said Lisa, ‘I never expected it, it’s awfully nice.’
‘Yes, he is nice,’ said Fay, ‘awfully nice. He really is. He’s the nicest man I’ve ever met.’
She smiled happily, and then quite shyly.
‘Oh, that’s good,’ said Lisa. ‘I’m very happy for you both, I really am.’
‘Thank you,’ said Fay. ‘Well, I suppose we’d better get ourselves down to Ladies’ Cocktail.’
‘My second last morn ing,’ said Lisa. ‘My thirty-second last, or something,’ said Fay.
They both laughed.
‘The end of an era,’ said Lisa.
‘Yes,’ said Fay, ‘it really is. I wonder what’s happened to Patty Williams?’
‘Perhaps she’s pregnant,’ said Lisa, ‘don’t you think?’
‘Gee, that’s an idea,’ said Fay. ‘She’s certainly waited long enough.’
She hoped she wouldn’t have to wait as long. She didn’t for a moment seriously imagine that she would.
Miss Cartright was leaving half an hour early because she had to go to the dentist. She saw Mr Ryder on her way out.
‘Such goings on,’ she said. ‘I suppose you’ve noticed we’re losing half of Ladies’ Cocktail. Miss Baines has given us one month’s notice—
not
a long engagement! And I have a funny feeling that we won’t be seeing much more of Mrs Williams. I don’t know why.’
‘Oh well,’ said Mr Ryder, ‘change is the law of life, my dear.’
‘Still,’ said Miss Cartright, ‘I’d better speak to Personnel tomorrow. We need one more permanent staff member immediately and a possible other soon.’
Mr Ryder surveyed his territory. Trade! It was a wonderful spectacle. All of human life is here, he thought. They come and they go. One thing only remains constant, and that’s Miss Jacobs—the dear. How I wonder—well, there you are.
He was feeling entirely philosophical by five-thirty; he got ready to leave and walked slowly down the fire stairs. A few dawdlers hurried past him; the building was now virtually empty and in a minute would be closed, locked and bolted fast against the night. He thought he might walk along Elizabeth Street this evening; it was more peaceful. As he approached King Street he noticed a familiar slim figure some distance ahead of him. Ah, he said to himself, there’s young Lisa. How she’d grown up in the six or seven weeks she’d been with them: she’d been a child, frail, skinny; now she was a slim young lady with a string of exam results. He watched her walking along ahead, quite self-possessed, quite poised. She was carrying a large dress box of the kind they used in Model Gowns, dark blue with a discreet yellow label dead centre on the lid. My, he thought, they learn fast, the young ladies. Five minutes working with Magda and they’re buying Model Gowns. Well, more strength to her arm. Must’ve splashed out her total wages. Back into the business! Under her other arm was another smaller box tied with pink ribbon. Chocolates? Can’t think what else it might be. Now then. Young girl. New frock. Box of chocolates. That’s all just as it should be!
THE END
An obituary by Christopher Potter
Madeleine St John wrote four novels in her short writing life. She was fifty-two when the first,
The Women in Black
, was published in 1993. The other three followed soon after, and form a loose trilogy set in contemporary London; Notting Hill, where she lived most of her adult life, particularly favoured.
The Essence of the Thing
(1997) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. She also left behind an unfinished manuscript.
Language and a questioning faith are the two poles of St John’s created world, as may also have been true of her domestic world. In a last letter, to her beloved vicar, Father Alex Hill, she wrote: ‘If I have managed to be a Christian at all, it is due to the marvellous Book of Common Prayer.’ Beneath the sly and witty veneer of her writing, she explores questions that are basically theological: we must do the right thing, but how can we tell what the right thing is? This question is at the heart of all of her novels.
In 2002 Madeleine St John prepared strict funeral instructions.
She was very ill for at least the last decade of her life. Emphysema made her a virtual recluse, though her illness did not stop her smoking. Her tin of Golden Virginia was often to be seen next to her inhaler, and later, her oxygen supply. Her reclusiveness was furthered by the fact that she lived, for the last twenty years of her life, on the top floor of a house owned by the Notting Hill Housing Trust. She called herself a housing trustafarian.
She claimed to be a de facto recluse for lack of money—not that St John ever complained of her lot—but her isolation was not entirely outside her control. St John could be very entertaining company, but she had a habit of casting anyone who got too close into outer darkness, usually for reasons entirely opaque to the one cast out. She could just as easily reel friends back in, and for similarly mysterious reasons. She lived by a strict moral code, the rules of which were only truly clear to herself.
Her strict funeral instructions were ingeniously and subversively carried out by Fr Alex. Though no reference was to be made to her life, Fr Alex managed to circumvent this by speaking of her before the service began, a sly and witty ploy that Madeleine would surely have appreciated.
The control and desire for anonymity were typical St John qualities. At her death, her always Spartan flat was found to have been even further denuded. An obviously brand-new address book contained the telephone numbers of only a handful of people.
Her estranged sister, Collette, has written that St John’s writing emerged out of a life full of an ‘enormous amount of pain and suffering’. Madeleine St John was born in 1941 in a smart suburb of Sydney called Castlecrag. Her father, Edward St John, was the son of a Church of England canon and a descendant of many famous St Johns, including Ambrose St John, who converted to Rome and was a close friend of Cardinal John Henry Newman, and Oliver St John, who challenged the legality of Charles I’s so-called ship money.
Edward St John, too, challenged unfairness where he found it. As a distinguished QC and a renegade Liberal MP, he spoke out against apartheid and nuclear armament. He almost single-handedly undermined John Gorton, drawing attention in the House to the Prime Minister’s rackety private life; he later resigned. Edward was said to be a cold and distant father, though Madeleine admitted that he had given her a lot, including a love of literature. But the relationship deteriorated. The rift grew and the estrangement became permanent. Edward St John died in 1994.
Madeleine’s adored mother, Sylvette, was born in Paris. Sylvette’s parents were Romanian Jews—Jean and Feiga Cargher —who arrived in Paris in 1915 and fl ed for Australia in 1934. At first, Sylvette and Edward were happily married, but the marriage turned sour. Sylvette was a depressive and committed suicide in 1954 when Madeleine was twelve.
At the instruction of their father, Madeleine and her younger sister had been sent to a private school that Madeleine likened to Lowood. It was there that the news of their mother’s death was broken to them by the headmistress, who told them that they were never to speak of their mother again. Madeleine never referred to this event in public, observing only that the death of her mother ‘obviously changed everything’. Edward St John remarried. There were three sons from the second marriage.
Madeleine read English at Sydney University, graduating in 1963, the year, according to Philip Larkin, that ‘sex began’. In Sydney, 1963 was the year the satirical magazine
Oz
was first published. Its editor, Richard Walsh, was a contemporary from university. Perhaps coincidentally, Edward St John was to defend him at the first
Oz
obscenity trial in 1964.
Other contemporaries from that remarkable year at Sydney University included Germaine Greer, Clive James, the film director Bruce Beresford, the poet Les Murray, the historian Robert Hughes, and John Bell, Australia’s foremost Shakespearean actor. It was at the university dramatic society that Beresford first met St John. (He is her literary executor.) ‘I remember being very struck by her verbal ripostes and observations about our associates.’
Honi Soit
, the student paper, described her performance as the whip-cracking courtesan Lola Montez as a ‘roly-poly barrel of fun’, a description that would amaze anyone who only knew the older St John, but, as a friend of hers recently observed, ‘You should have seen her when she was young.’
For all her wit and brilliance—Richard Walsh remembers her as the first person he knew who had read Proust—St John had few close friends at university. She said later that she had the ‘somewhat laughable idea that university was a place where nothing happened but a devotion to the truth and an attempt to understand it’. She was unusual amongst that libertarian society for being an avid churchgoer, a lifelong habit, and for having a famous father.
Soon after graduating, St John married a fellow student, Christopher Tillam, who became a filmmaker. They lived in California briefl y, before she went on ahead to England, where her husband was to join her. He never arrived and divorce followed. St John never remarried.
As an outsider, St John was fascinated by the English. She said that England ‘was everything one had hoped for and has continued to be so’:
‘I was brought up on the idea that England was where I came from, in a deep sense where I belonged. Australia was a deviation of one’s essence.’
Though she never had much money, she found the pre-Thatch-er years suited her well enough:
‘I had a succession of little jobs in bookshops and offices. There were plenty of jobs if you got bored.’
But the jobs eventually dried up—except for a couple of days a week working in an antique shop in Church Street, Kensington— and St John realised that her CV ‘looked like a nightmare’. She spent the next eight years attempting to write a biography of Madame Blavatsky, a manuscript she ultimately destroyed.
Her first novel came more easily. She wrote it, in long hand, in six months.
The Women in Black
is a perfect-pitch comedy of manners set in the ladies’ cocktail section of F.G. Goode’s, a department store in 1950s Sydney. Though St John claimed she could never ‘pull off’ anything autobiographical, it is hard not to see some of her in the protagonist Lesley Miles, the clever girl (‘“A clever girl is the most wonderful thing in all Creation”, said Miss Jacobs’) hoping to go up to university, and who changes her name to Lisa.
A Pure Clear Light
followed in 1996 and
A Stairway to Paradise
in 1999. But her third novel,
The Essence of the Thing
, is probably her masterwork: ‘a further chapter’, as one of the characters remarks, ‘in the gruesome, yet frequently hilarious saga of the island people who had given the planet its common language and virtually all its games’.
Christopher Potter, 2006