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Not long after the Booker publicity— I had given her no thought since encountering Manning a year or two earlier at an exhibition: we'd exchanged our last communications with Madeleine and then parted, without bonhomie— I unearthed three items which I thought should be returned to their owner and, having contacted her London publisher and received a reply to forward these care of their office, I packed the relics (a book, a card, a bundle of letters in her elegant hand) in a manilla folder, attached a cheerful postcard of two cats on a tin roof, and heard no more.

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The letters were to my mother, Joan, with whom Madeleine maintained a correspondence beyond our marriage, and beyond her later sojourn in Sydney. They had much in common, sensibilities honed to the point of excluding most of the local quotidian, a delight in small beauties, in the juxtaposition of words and of objects. Each had entered upon marriage with reluctance, and each had blossomed after parting. I cannot tell you more about the letters, as I did not unbundle them.

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The book is four inches square, the size of the prints from the simplest camera of those days, and half as thick. The cover is a blue cardboard, its binding hand sewn, the paper grey. She—or rather, we, as I was party to her announced intention of "making a little book for Joan"—dismantled the album which had documented our domestic life in three cities, and sent the condensed version back to Springwood.

Perfunctory honeymoon at the Hotel Bundanoon... after the fires, on the road behind the village shops, a tiny memorial in a sandstone fireplace... Our first images: on the balcony of the Belvedere Hotel in King's Cross, she, challenging camera in her grey going-away pants suit and I, in profile, in the inevitable tweed jacket, plus cigarette. Still in profile, I'm a jackinabox at the wheel of a '54 Chevrolet; the jacket survives in a photo of a film shoot outside I. Magnin, the F. W. Goode's of San Francisco.

Some California visitors went undocumented: Wilton, fellow Pauline refugee,found his Avatar in the hills outside LA, and came to urge us, too, to Take the Trip... Jill from Maui (like Madeleine, and her sister Colette and myself, a resident of Chica Lowe's Elizabeth Bay ménage— rooms for young women, gay boys, black sheep and gentlemen in tailored suits, pending the divorce) ...also Steve, who could whistle you a phone number. There's an image of Rubbo, passing through from Montreal to Mexico: we are examining our sample of the first Australian dollar note, despatched by Ant, her Castlecrag cousin.

The images are mostly views, views from the windows of three apartments: Bay Laurel Drive, in Menlo Park; in San Francisco, on California Avenue, next to the fire station, no trees (and where, late one night, I slipped out for a pack of cigarettes and returned at dawn, having been detained as, possibly, the local Peeping Tom— a misadventure for which Madeleine exhibited little sympathy); and in Agassiz Street, Cambridge, an avenue of immense elms. Each of us is backlit when we appear... not looking at the camera, pensive, or reading, or waking up... the play of foliage in sunlight. And in threequarter view, a sedate Madeleine at the Beacon Hill market, in summer straw hat, the last image, or the last I recall. And the last of Madeleine herself: departing from New York via the Algonquin (she insisted, it being Dorothy Parker's watering-hole) and the helipad atop the PanAm Building ...under tarmac lights, in rain, between onramp and cabin door, a flash of red.

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One winter day she brings home a book of photographs of Paris, and I too become entranced. Now she produces the card— it is more the size of a flyer than a modern business card, doubtless there is a precise term for it in its native French— which advertises, in text of many flourishes, a shop of brass bedsteads. Madeleine's grandfather. We wonder whether, amongst the collection from which the book is drawn, there may be a photograph of the window of the establishment of Madeleine's grandpère, with its embellished lits-cages. If there is, I didn't find it, though I searched two days, in mittens, in an unheated house at Moose Head Lake: and on that disappointment the possibility of a film between us foundered. Madeleine's narrative, though it may not have survived, would have confirmed for her the possibility of writing.

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A final conversation, by phone, in Sydney, out of the blue:

It's Madeleine
I believe you still owe me some money



I don't send bills

Send me an invoice

Vanishing point.
We were a match, we had made of eachother a refuge in the shadows of the ruins of two families. We each brought our demons, and in the confined and fragile spaces of our marriage, you gave yours free rein.

January 2025                   We each brought our demons, and in the confined
                                and fragile spaces of our marriage, I gave mine
                                free rein.

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In common with certain other stylists— Barthes and R.H. Blyth, and Said come to mind (and, we might guess, Jane Austen)— there is a precision in her writing which has its origin in another practice. A recent re-reading of The Women in Black, with its overtones of Eudora Welty, brought this to mind: the musicality here is so strong, in the structure as in the phrasing. I recall her struggling with a Scarlatti piece which she'd agreed to play for a sound-track: she was most-unhappy with its imperfections, and though its hesitant quality was a match for the subject, new students on a new campus, at Santa Cruz, there was no choice but to use the Horowitz version ...a cousin to the stately funeral-piece, it came floating over the fog and the pines from the practice-rooms, just once