Lost Autumn

by Mary-Rose MacColl

  She shook her head again in disbelief. “A pot of tea, you say, on a customer? Well, I never. How does an accident like that happen?” Her face was sour, as if I’d just done it all over again, poured tea, but in her lap rather than the lap of the chap at Christie’s Cafe in Brisbane.

  “It wasn’t an accident,” I said. Why on earth was I telling them this? If I’d wanted the job, as she told me after escorting me from the room, I probably should have rethought that story.

  It wasn’t me who wanted the job, although I didn’t say that to her. It was my mother, who had to find a way to feed the five remaining children in my family as well my father and herself. My mother had brought us on the train from Brisbane to see the prince, but so far all she’d seen was the Government House advertisement for serving girls. She’d failed twice to see the royal presence—the day he arrived, with us in tow, and the next day, even after splurging a shilling to stand for ten minutes on a wooden crate. I would warrant she carried some hope that the prince would help us out of our misery just by being. My getting a job serving on his train was the next best thing.

  There was no money left since Daddy lost his teaching job, and the only wage now was my brother Bert’s and it was not enough. I had a job. I lost it. I had to find another. We were, without putting it too delicately, skint, and it was my responsibility, as the oldest surviving child, to do something.

  And now, incredibly, despite my inability to tell a lie, I’d been given a job on the royal train!

  * * *

  Mr. Waters had said I was to report to the dining car but I didn’t know which car it was. I assumed it would be in the back carriages, close to the prince’s private quarters, which I knew to be the last carriage, from the pictures in the newspaper. The train had a little portico on the very back and I’d seen photographs of the prince waving from there as he went from town to town.

  Along George Street, I’d noticed, there were still streamers hanging from windows left over from the parade the day before, grubby confetti covering the ground in some places, especially around the bank, where people had mulled in hope of a glimpse of the prince. They’d collected around Government House too, I saw, perhaps assuming he’d slept there. I didn’t know where he’d slept.

  I was still standing on the railway platform, wondering what to do next, when a voice behind me said, “Are you lost?”

  Five

  LONDON, 1997

  Victoria was in the middle of the bullpen now when someone she’d never seen before rushed past her, newspaper galleys in hand. There was never this much hurry for good news, only tragedy. She looked for a familiar face but they were all strangers other than one or two she thought she recognized from downstairs and a sub from The Eye. There were extra phones, she noticed, cords running along the floor.

  Victoria hadn’t seen this many people in a newsroom since John Lennon’s death. She’d been at The Guardian in December 1980, just starting out. Everyone was on that story through the night, and then they’d gone together to an all-night bar near the offices afterward to numb the emotions that began to wash over them, a deep sadness that felt like a comfortable old cardigan to Victoria. They were all together, senior journalists, subs, cadets. Someone had a guitar, and they all sang “Imagine.” She hadn’t turned twenty. Oh God, she was a journalist. She was bringing the news, the truth, to the world. She was at The Guardian—the guardian of truth, she believed then. She felt as if her real life had just begun, as if this was what she’d been called to do.

  Victoria looked across to the conference room where the morning editorial meeting was already underway. She remembered the taxi driver, “all hands.” She stopped a copyboy whose face she knew but whose name she’d never learned. “What’s going on?” she said.

  “They don’t know yet.”

  “They don’t know what’s going on?”

  But he was gone.

  She went to her desk, wound her bag around the chair, hung her mac on the hook on the side of the partition. No Daniella at reception. Victoria looked over toward the conference room again—glass walls, not soundproofed, not vision-proofed, in the middle of the floor. They called it the fishbowl, because you could see the fish. Victoria grabbed her laptop and a yellow legal pad and pen and walked back across the bullpen.

  “Well, here’s the lass herself,” Ewan said when she walked in. He was wearing the only tie he owned, tied too tightly then loosened off so you had to wonder why he bothered, with a blue shirt that hadn’t been ironed. Black jeans, black gym boots on his feet. Ewan’s uniform, if he had one. He was sitting back from the table, legs crossed, a relaxed pose in anyone else but Ewan managed to look tense.

  Thin, if not the first word that came to mind, was among the first three you’d use to describe the editor of Britain’s most edgy and (on June sales figures) most popular magazine. High-strung would have to be one of the other two, and then maybe intelligent. He smiled at her, but even his smile came out high-strung, full of eyebrow, his dark auburn fringe pushed straight back.

  “Nice to see you, Victoria,” he said, with what she took for irritation in his voice. Ewan was one of three people in her life who refused to call her Tori. The others were her father and her best friend Claire who’d always called her Victoria.

  Tori Winter, Ben had said on their second date. They were at a rugby match; Victoria had just written a long feature about English captain Will Carling. Tori Winter sounds good, Ben said. They weren’t engaged. He hadn’t asked her—of course he hadn’t; it was their second date—but he gave her his surname. You could go on stage with a name like that, he continued, without missing a beat. He’d called her Tori from then on. She’d liked it, so she’d asked everyone else to call her Tori too. Her byline was still the same though. Tori Byrd was sure to prompt laughs in a way Victoria Byrd wouldn’t.

  Victoria’s colleagues were all there around the table, even some she’d thought were on leave, along with an assistant editor from The Eye. There was no story list for October on the whiteboard. There was nothing on the whiteboard.

  “Sorry,” Victoria said. “What’s all this?” She gestured out to the bullpen. She sat down at the nearest corner of the table.

  “Got your go-bag?” Ewan was rubbing his cheek, looking at her face.

  She dusted her own cheek. It was sore to her touch. “What?” she said.

  “What did you do?” he said, frowning.

  “I fell,” she said. She thought she remembered catching her heel in the carpet on the stairs and going over last night. It was after she’d taken the rubbish out. She didn’t get her arm down in time and she’d hit her cheek on the architrave. “Is it red?” she asked. It gave her a fright to think of it now.

  He nodded, still looking at her.

  Oh dear. She’d hardly looked in a mirror before she left home. God knew what her hair was like. She felt found out suddenly, as if she’d been doing something wrong. She hadn’t been doing anything wrong. She thought of making a joke about sleeping in but decided against it. The mood was anything but jokey today.

  “Why do I need a go-bag?” she said, focusing on Ewan. Most senior reporters kept a bag in the office in case they had to travel at short notice. Victoria hadn’t used hers since joining the magazine and she’d let it slide. Her specialty nowadays was celebrity interviews; fat-cat journalism, as her father called it, a long privileged way from bringing any kind of truth to the world, although Victoria didn’t let herself think about that. She hardly ever faced a tight deadline. She was often at the mercy of her interviewees anyway, especially in the early days. She might have more choice about who she interviewed now, but there were still those whose lives were complicated by fame and success. She was the bottom of the pack as far as they and their publicists were concerned.

  Danny Brown, the photographer Victoria might have turned to for advice, was on the other side of the conference room. She’d hoped t
o sidle over to Danny and find out what was going on before she was put on the spot. She tried to look a question his way, hoping for a hint, but Danny was so stone-faced, he didn’t even notice Victoria. Danny took everything in his stride but this morning he looked as if he’d been in a bomb blast. Danny had photographed what to most people would be unthinkably hard even to witness, let alone record. She had no idea what had rattled him, but something had.

  “Sorry I’m late,” she said, looking back at Ewan. “And it sounds like I drew the short straw on something?”

  “What?” Ewan said curtly. “Have you not heard?”

  She shook her head.

  He sat up and forward, pulling his chair into the table, donned his glasses.

  He looked at her, his green eyes framed now by the kind of big dark rims that give a face an odd vulnerability.

  “Princess Diana is dead. We’re holding the edition.”

  Six

  SYDNEY, 1920

  I turned around and saw a woman, smartly dressed in a straight blue skirt and ivory blouse, a blue jacket matching the skirt, pearls, gloves, and a hat of navy blue felt. Her shoes were ivory like the blouse. She had soft strawberry-blond curls that surrounded a pixie face. Her skin glowed. I thought she was the most beautiful creature I had ever encountered and yet, unlike what one might expect, not at all unapproachable. She smiled warmly. I knew immediately we would be friends.

  “I’m Helen Burns,” she said, holding out her hand. Her accent was hard to pick. She definitely wasn’t English. Her vowels didn’t end; they just sort of faded. “If you’ve made it this far, I assume you’re not a Fenian who might have dastardly intentions.” She was smoking a cigarette, I saw now, as she put it to her lips quite casually there on the platform.

  “No, I’m the new maid,” I said. “What’s a Fenian?”

  “Irish, from Ireland. They shot his uncle.”

  “I beg pardon?”

  “Doesn’t matter. Are you looking for someone?”

  “Mr. Waters,” I said. “He’s to meet me in the dining car in fifteen minutes.”

  “Rupert!” she exclaimed. “Oh yes, I know who you are. You’re a Bright.”

  “I am,” I said. “And not a Fenian.”

  She laughed. “Your father is the poet, Thomas Bright.”

  “He is,” I said, perplexed. “Thomas Bright, Tom. I’m Maddie Bright. And you’re from Jane Eyre?”

  She looked unsure momentarily then smiled. “Oh yes, the name. I’ve never heard that joke before, of course. That’s what threw me.”

  American, that was her accent, I was sure. She was American. My father had described the way the soldiers spoke and it was just like this, as if they’d made the English language either more or less efficient, depending on the word, stretching out the vowels as a general rule and demoting more than a few of the consonants.

  “Well, not in recent times anyway, when I’ve been in the company of uneducated men. But as it happens, just like Helen Burns, I am an orphan, although fortunately of independent means and I do not suffer from consumption.” She laughed at her own little joke. It took me a moment more to remember that part of the book. Jane’s friend Helen Burns had died of consumption.

  “And you’re joining us today,” Helen Burns went on. “Yes, I remember now. Rupert has been called away to some awful business, I should think, given that the prince has been afforded a gun and they sent Ned to supervise. Let’s just hope that the prince shot Ned and not the other way around. Black mark for the tour if we kill the prince. Oh my God, I didn’t really say that, did I?

  “I am the other Helen Burns, the one who is not Jane Eyre’s best friend. I am the prince’s assistant dealing with the newspapermen, and I am to welcome you.” She bowed her head. “Welcome to the Royal Tour of His Royal Highness Edward, Prince of Wales, to our dominions, and so on.” She gestured with her cigarette hand. “You may bow low or curtsy now.” I began to bend at the knees as my mother had taught me. “Oh, for goodness’ sake, I wasn’t serious.”

  She laughed then, such a whoop of a laugh that others around us turned their heads. Looking serious suddenly, she said, “Do you take after him?”

  “Who?”

  “The poet. I mean, you do write?”

  “I do,” I said, delighted to have been asked. “I write stories, and I want to be a journalist.”

  “Do you really? How marvelous! Just like moi!” She looked whimsical for a moment. “Not poetry? What a shame. But I knew you’d write. I told Ned, she’s one to grab with both hands. I made Ned tell Rupert.” She looked down at my portmanteau and frowned. “Is that all you’ve got?” she said.

  My bag held almost everything I owned: a gray skirt, a cotton blouse, smalls, and an extra pair of shoes, brown. I wore my only coat, black wool, and my other skirt and blouse, both blue. My hair was pulled into a bun ready for a maid’s cap. I wore no hat for I had no hat to wear. I looked nothing like the sophisticated woman before me. All we had in common was curls, and even her curls were better behaved than mine.

  “They said uniforms are supplied,” I said.

  “How truly magnificent,” she said, “to be so free. Let’s take you on board then. Are your eyes green?”

  “Yes,” I said, although most people would have said they were blue.

  “I thought so. Lovely.”

  “I’m supposed to meet Mr. Waters.”

  “You simply mustn’t call him that. Both he and I will start looking for his father. He’ll want you to call him Rupert.”

  I knew this was unlikely.

  “At any rate, he’s late,” Helen said, looking behind her down the platform. “I’ll show you where he is normally, then we’ll go and find him together.” She took a last draw on her cigarette and squashed it into the tile with her shoe to extinguish it. “All right,” she said. “So you don’t write poetry. I wish you wrote poetry. Couldn’t you try, just for me?”

  I laughed. “I don’t think it works like that. Are you a poet?”

  “Good Lord, no. I am what’s called a hack. Anyway, you’re young yet. Perhaps the poetry will find you. Your father’s work is extraordinary. You’ve read him, of course.”

  “Yes,” I said, “when he lets me.” I thought of Daddy. Rats. All he wrote about now was rats. You couldn’t call it poetry, not even doggerel.

  “Does he love that you write?”

  “Oh yes,” I said, remembering an earlier time, another life really. “He used to play this game where we each had to supply the next sentence of a story. Mine were always thoughtful, Daddy said, but my brother Edward was our man of action.”

  It was a game we hadn’t played since Daddy had come home from France, since Edward hadn’t. I had a moment then of wretched despair, the weight of everything, my poor family so brought down in the world: Mummy so desperate to see Prince Edward, who would be our king one day: Daddy, who’d come home a year ago so changed. And our own Edward, who I couldn’t think about without tears, which pricked my eyes now.

  I felt dowdy in my skirt and blouse, a cardigan I’d had to darn the night before. I felt sudden terrible shame about who I was.

  “I’m not a writer,” I said to Helen Burns to straighten out any misunderstanding. “I’m a servant.” I said the word servant with some energy, not meaning to be disparaging, just meaning to be clear.

  “Well, service is honest work,” Helen Burns said, smiling warmly. “Writing, so often, is not.

  “I did not have a father anything like yours, Maddie,” she said earnestly then. “Mine was a stepfather, about which not enough has been written. It’s stepmothers we hate, but stepfathers lurk behind even the best mothers, and their lurking is something we would do well to note.”

  She looked at me and grinned suddenly. “Oh, please don’t despair about service, Maddie. For me, it’s just lovely to meet someone who’s not a sycoph
ant. Fresh. It’s fresh. And at least you’re small.” She giggled then, more quietly than the previous whoop. She looked younger now, a schoolgirl, as if the sophisticated woman was a mask she donned for the world and those who saw her laugh this way saw the real person. “I shouldn’t really say that, should I? But David’s a dear little boy, and he doesn’t like big women. You’ll be perfect!”

  “David?” I said, but she mustn’t have heard.

  She looked along the platform toward the line of policemen guarding nothing in particular. “Oh God, it’s just so stuffy, the whole thing. I’m sure he’d rather get out on a farm and work than all these stunts they put on for him. I know I would.”

  “I went to see him with my mother and brothers,” I said, realizing she must be talking about the prince now. “At the town hall. But he’d already left.”

  We had lined up for hours on the holiday for his birthday, hoping to walk past and see him up close.

  “Story of his life,” Helen said. “They have him doing this and that and really it’s not in him. He shook over two thousand hands that day. His hand was so bruised they had to fetch the doctor.”

  “Goodness,” I said.

  I looked about nervously. There were people everywhere now and a growing sense of departure seemed to envelop the platform.

  “I have to say, it’s all come as a surprise,” I said.

  “What has?” she said.

  “The position. I didn’t think I’d be appointed.”