Lost Autumn

by Mary-Rose MacColl

  Thirteen

  LONDON, 1997

  Victoria walked into the Jardine Club dining room behind a waiter who’d met her at the door and told her Mr. Inglis had already arrived, as if she were late and he, the waiter, took it personally. He was young, with a pretentiousness that might grow old with him and become far less endearing.

  Victoria had heard of the Jardine, of course. Women were allowed as guests on certain days, she understood. Her father had lunched here—many politicians on both sides were members. “The real problem with those clubs is the food,” he said once. “They don’t seem to have changed the menu since the thirties.”

  “Not the sexism?” Victoria had said.

  “That too, I suppose,” he said. “But I could put up with the sexism if the food were better.” At least he smiled as he said it.

  Victoria surveyed the room. “More dinosaurs per square yard than Jurassic Park,” Claire had said when Victoria mentioned she was lunching here.

  She was trying to work out which of the old men looking up at her was Finian Inglis when a tall, slim fellow stood, a serviette drifting from his lap. He bent down to pick it up before the hovering waiter could, smiling affably as he stood again.

  He had a fresh, pinkish face surrounded by wisps of snowy-white hair, as if he’d patted himself with baby powder that morning. Pink was a good descriptor for him more generally, Victoria thought; its softness, perhaps. He wore a tailored black suit over a crisp white shirt with cuff links and a colorful tie, and yet managed not to look smart. There was no swishing dinosaur tail as far as Victoria could see. More absentminded professor than apex predator, more avuncular than prehistoric, and not quite at home there in a men’s club with its port and cigars, she was relieved to learn.

  When Finian Inglis had suggested the Jardine for their meeting, Victoria pictured the sort of man Claire described, the kind for whom the seventies had never happened, for whom Nine to Five was a zany comedy rather than a rallying cry: Des Pearce from the magazine—or Harry Knight himself, come to think of it. Every woman knew at least one or two of them, the kind who wouldn’t think twice about whether they should stretch their hand around your waist in a group photograph and find some breast and dig in. Not charming in any way. Did they think women liked this? Did they care?

  Finian Inglis didn’t look like that sort at all. His publishing house, Barlow Inglis, had a reputation for quality. They’d picked winners in the past, punching well above their weight, although Victoria seemed to recall they were faltering financially nowadays.

  Of course, none of their big-name authors was bigger than M. A. Bright, whose novel, Autumn Leaves, a poignant love story set against the horror of World War I, was likely penned by one of the war poets writing under a pseudonym, Victoria had read in a two-pound novel guide last night. When it was first published in 1922, there was enormous speculation as to the identity of the injured captain and his ambulance driver lover. They were unnamed—Victoria’s Cambridge boyfriend had done a PhD on why, but she couldn’t remember the conclusion.

  “Mr. Inglis,” Victoria said, smiling.

  “Finian, please,” he said. “I’m so glad you could make today. May I call you Victoria?”

  “Of course,” she said, charmed. No one else asked. “Tori.”

  Finian Inglis spoke like her English teachers in school, stressing every consonant, clipping every vowel to its minimum length. He went to shake her hand, forgetting he was still holding the serviette, and then had to swap it to his other hand before they shook. “Actually, I thought you might cancel,” he said. “After last night.”

  “Yes, I’m going to Paris this afternoon,” she said.

  “Awful,” he said. “Imagine those boys waking up this morning. The younger one’s twelve. A terrible age to lose your mother.”

  She nodded. “Yes, terrible.” Was there a good age? she wondered. Victoria had been almost twelve. She hardly thought of her mother now, she would say if anyone asked. Not that they asked very often. Her grandmother had done everything a mother might and more, she always said, smiling broadly. People rarely understood what it was like.

  It was like being a bird, growing up without wings.

  “I just mean,” he went on, as if she’d spoken her thoughts aloud, “in that family, she’d have been the only bright spot, don’t you agree? She had a bit of spark. Imagine it. You’ll be all right. Granny and Granddad are here. Good God!” He shook his head.

  “I suppose so,” Victoria said, although that hadn’t been her experience. Her grandparents had filled the gap marvelously. They’d been to everything at school when her father wasn’t available and often when he was, driving for hours just to see her play in an ensemble or act as a tree in a pantomime. She’d spent most holidays with them up in Craster when her father was working. They’d been grandparents and parents both. Who could know that the Queen and Prince Philip wouldn’t be the same?

  Victoria surveyed the dining room. Not another diner under seventy, most well beyond that.

  “It’s like trying to stop an historical film that just keeps running, I’m afraid, closing places like this,” Finian said, noticing her gaze and gesturing around the room. “I often feel we’re already an exhibit.” He laughed quietly.

  “Yes, that’s a good way of putting it,” she said.

  They both ordered fish and drank water from a crystal pitcher on the table.

  The waiter hovered. Victoria wondered if waiters at clubs were tipped. She didn’t want to ask.

  Finian Inglis chatted amiably, in no hurry to get to the point of their meeting. The fish came, overcooked, in a buttery sauce with green beans whose day was long gone. Finian didn’t comment but didn’t eat with relish either. Victoria felt queasy, having missed breakfast and now looking at the glistening, sagging blob of white on the plate. She pushed it from one side to the other, took small bites, hoping to cover it with the serviette when the time was right.

  “So Ewan told me you wanted to discuss M. A. Bright?” Victoria said.

  “Tell me about you first,” he said. He knew she’d written for The Guardian, he said. She explained she’d gone from there to The Daily Mail and then to Knight News.

  “Quite a trajectory,” he said.

  “That’s what my father says,” she replied. “Although downward after The Guardian to his mind, so perhaps a reverse trajectory. I think he had visions of me as an investigative reporter, Woodward and Bernstein for the eighties.”

  He laughed. “Fathers and daughters.” He added quickly, “I have daughters,” as if to qualify himself. “And I knew Michael at Cambridge, of course. What a mind.”

  “Yes,” she said. “But if you’re wondering, I think I take after my mother, not my father.”

  “She was the microbiologist?”

  “Yes, she was,” Victoria said, wondering how he would know that. “They met at Cambridge.”

  “So the way I see it, no slouch in the brain department on either side.” He smiled.

  She felt she was being assessed for something but didn’t know what.

  “I also knew your grandfather,” he said then. “Michael’s father. Not well, but he nearly did a book for us, thirty years ago maybe? One of Sir Antony’s.”

  “A book? What about?” Victoria said.

  “I don’t know. An explorer? Antarctica? Does that ring a bell?”

  She shook her head. Victoria’s grandfather had been a history teacher and he did love the explorers. “I didn’t know that.” She wiped her lips with her serviette and then covered her plate with it. She was feeling less queasy but not hungry. “He used to take me fishing when I was little,” she said, grinning, “but I wasn’t any good. I felt too sorry for the fish so we had to throw them back. He said they didn’t feel any pain with the hook. I think he was lying.”

  Finian laughed. “We all lie,” he said.

 
“Anyway, The Guardian was Daddy’s version of a newspaper, as you can well imagine,” Victoria said. “It would have been my grandfather’s too, I think. I never knew he wrote.”

  “And at Cambridge, you started in Classics?” Finian said.

  “Yes,” she replied, wondering how he’d know that too. “I switched to journalism at the London.”

  “So now you’re everywhere.” He smiled.

  Had he seen the pictures of her? She felt mortified.

  “I’m sorry,” he said immediately, seeing her reaction. “I just mean, we all read you at Bingles.”

  “Oh, that’s nice to know,” she said, relieved he didn’t mean the photographs. “Bingles?”

  “Our nickname,” he said fondly. “Barlow Inglis, Bingles.”

  She seemed to recall doing a profile on one of their writers, the Icelandic poet Mik Snikliw. That must be how he knew her name.

  “I’ve been very lucky,” she said. “I wrote a profile of Blair when he took over the Labour Party—before he was Blair, in some ways. That was syndicated, which got me quite a bit of notice, actually.”

  Finian Inglis was nodding. He’d read it, he said.

  “I mean, I didn’t create Blair or anything, which is what people said afterward. I just gave him more of a heart than he’d had previously, or showed the heart he already had. The headline was: FINDING A SOFT SPOT IN HARD LABOUR. After it ran I moved from The Eye to Vicious.”

  “And Vicious was not quite The Guardian in Michael’s mind?”

  “No, but not as bad as The Eye. Daddy knows Ewan, who was features editor of The Eye when I started, but the rest of the paper he always said he didn’t bother with. He liked Vicious at first. We caught a wave, women wanting something more in their reading—and, actually, we have a fair swag of male readers, according to Ewan.”

  “Yes, it’s good Ewan is still with Knight,” Finian said. “Keeps him honest.”

  “You know Harry Knight?”

  “We were on a panel together last year, the future of publishing. There’s one every five minutes at the moment.”

  “Ah,” she said. “Yes, he and Harry have pretty different politics, but Ewan has such a sensibility. He predicts the zeitgeist.”

  Victoria still felt like she was being assessed, as if this were a job interview, but she didn’t know what the job was.

  “Anyway,” she continued, “when Harry started Vicious, Ewan went up as editor and asked me if I’d come.”

  “And now they pay you so much it’s impossible to think of leaving?”

  “Something like that,” Victoria said. “I wish!”

  “Well, there’s not a lot of money anywhere in publishing anymore,” Finian said.

  Barlow Inglis had survived against the odds, he said. “We’re a teeny fish in a smaller and smaller pond. We get by.”

  The Barlow, Sir Antony Barlow, had been the publishing muscle in the house, Finian explained. “He discovered M. A. Bright, after all. When he retired, my father did well to reinvent us as an academic publisher. Since Father died a decade ago, I’ve managed to keep us afloat,” he said. He took a sip of his water, savoring it like wine, as if he’d forgotten it wasn’t. “So far.” He smiled weakly, his forehead more of a frown.

  “So what did you predict for the future on your panel with Harry?” she said.

  “I don’t think I even hazarded a guess,” he said. “We’re a cottage industry now. We’ll adapt or die. But change is coming. I just don’t know what it looks like yet. Harry was more upbeat, of course. But he would be. He runs his own show, and he’s got family money to do it with.”

  Victoria thought this unfair. Harry Knight was rich but he also knew how to sell newspapers.

  Finian put his glass down, as if he’d made up his mind about something. “So, Autumn Leaves?” He looked nervous, Victoria thought, as if unsure where this might take them.

  “Yes.” Victoria had read Autumn Leaves at school. Everyone had. It brought the realities of the Great War home to generations who’d never experienced war. It was at once personal and universal, as Victoria’s form five essay had attested, she told him. The protagonists were lovers of their time, but also timeless. “Although, come to think of it, I can’t remember much of the actual book at all.”

  He laughed. “Did you know it’s one of the bestselling books this century?”

  “No, I didn’t,” Victoria said.

  “That’s worldwide, yes. My father was terribly proud. Other publishers—I could name them if I were indiscreet—said Sir Antony should have rejected Autumn Leaves on ethical grounds.”

  Victoria looked at him quizzically.

  “In those days, no one was writing anything that brought the royal family into disrepute, even by association. Some publishers saw it as too sensationalist. Even some of the reviews said it was a book that shouldn’t have been published. There were libraries that banned it.”

  “Goodness,” Victoria said. “I bet they all ate their words.”

  Finian laughed. “Probably not. Self-righteousness rarely results in self-reflection, I’ve noticed.”

  “True, but it’s still selling.”

  “Oh my, yes. More than ever. This year is seventy-five years since the original publication, and although it’s a way off, I suspect World War I will only get more popular as we move toward the centenary, so it will be out there again, I should think.

  “It was Sir Antony who kept it in circulation and then, after he died, my father. It did reasonably well in the thirties but disappeared after the second war. And then it was on school lists from the sixties, so it sort of took on a life of its own.”

  Victoria sneaked a look at her watch.

  “And you have things to be getting on with today, of course. I’m so sorry. You must be wondering why we’re here.”

  She was but didn’t want to be rude.

  “I won’t keep you. To be honest, I’ve been spending this hour working up my courage. I wanted to get to know you a little because I have a problem I need your help with.”

  Victoria nodded.

  “It has to do with M. A. Bright, as I said on the telephone to Ewan. M. A. Bright, by the way, is Madeleine Bright, who lives in Australia.” He paused. “I’d always assumed she was English for some reason.”

  “I’d assumed she was a he!” Victoria said. “Madeleine?”

  “Yes, Madeleine. I knew that much, that Bright was a woman, because my father always referred to her as Miss Bright. But I assumed English. Anyway, Madeleine Bright may be English, or she may have always lived in Australia. I really don’t know. I’ve never met her and no one in the house has ever met her, but it seems there’s another book finally, and she wants you to interview her.” He exhaled.

  “Like Autumn Leaves?” Victoria asked.

  “Yes, a sequel, I think,” he said. “The first edition of Autumn Leaves previewed a sequel, and Sir Antony always hoped. But it never materialized beyond a prefatory chapter. Novelists can be like that. They shouldn’t make promises.”

  He looked at his hand on the table and then at Victoria again. “There’s a lost baby.”

  “A lost baby?”

  “Yes, you know, as a plot device.” He frowned. He looked at his hand again, as if it might run off if he didn’t keep an eye on it. “Although this one dies, so perhaps not quite an effective plot device.”

  “Really? A lost baby is a plot device?”

  “Oh, yes. Think of it.”

  She couldn’t think of one example, she realized, but didn’t say so.

  “So, why us?” Victoria said, intrigued.

  “Ah, well, yes, this is what I mean about fame. That’s why I asked all those intrusive questions. M. A. Bright knows you,” he said. “Or knows your writing.”

  “How?” Victoria asked. She wasn’t published in Australia, as fa
r as she knew.

  “Apparently, you wrote a feature in an Australian women’s magazine she read.”

  “I don’t think so,” Victoria said.

  “It was something about Diana, actually. Does that ring a bell?”

  Of course it did. The story Victoria had done on Charles and Diana ran in Australia first. It was a women’s magazine. Victoria couldn’t remember the name now. Then they ran it back in Britain. That way, if they were sued, they could claim they were quoting an existing publication.

  But that was ten years ago. She hadn’t done anything in Australia since. Vicious might have an audience there by now. Perhaps people read her in the magazine. And she’d done other stories on the Waleses. For a time, she’d been seen as a royal expert. Oh God, she thought now. The things we do.

  Finian Inglis went on. “As far as I know, the new book—Winter Skies is the working title—has a link to the royals; not Diana and Charles, earlier, Edward VIII, the one who abdicated, set when he was Prince of Wales. As I say, a sequel to Autumn Leaves, with some new characters. Do you remember the main character in Autumn Leaves was the batman to the Prince of Wales?”

  She didn’t.

  “It doesn’t matter. Bright very much liked what you wrote about Diana, apparently.” He paused. “I’ll be honest. I assumed she was dead. Her royalties go to a bank account set up by my father here in London at the beginning. I don’t know if anyone draws on that account.

  “Sir Antony, who knew the author personally, was silent on the subject of Bright, and my father was reluctant to talk too. Or perhaps he was ignorant. I don’t think Father ever met her in person.

  “Anyway, I thought M. A. Bright had died. I expected we’d hear from an estate. We’d done everything as we should, paying the money when it was due. I want to assure you on that score. It’s still a selling novel for the house.

  “We heard nothing”—he leaned in to speak more quietly—“until about fifteen years ago, when we got a letter from an agent in Australia, an Edward McIntrick.” He said the name softly. “And this McIntrick said Madeleine Bright was his client and she was finishing the second novel.