Lost Autumn

by Mary-Rose MacColl

  Was that it?

  “It will only be like this until we take over the story,” she remembered Ben saying last night, his eyes tired in the dim light. That was his solution, to take over the story. He thought he could manage everything. He thought his money could manage everything. Perhaps he was right. What did she know?

  Ben operated in a world where beauty, or some hard-to-define quality related to beauty, was what made the difference between success and failure. “Harrison Ford,” he’d said to her. “Harrison Ford was a carpenter. He’s everyman. A lot of guys look like Harrison. Brown hair, eyes a color you can’t remember later, bit angry round the mouth. But not one in a million can close their mouth and raise an eyebrow and look so afraid and so competent all at once. That’s the guy. He’s just the guy.”

  The first night they slept together, Ben had said, “You have no flaws.”

  “That’s a good thing, right?” she said, wondering where he was going.

  “Yes and no. Think of the most beautiful woman in the world to you.”

  “Kate Winslet, this month.”

  “See, she has flaws.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Her cheekbones are not what you want with those lips. It combines as the gift.”

  “The gift.”

  “Our looks are a gift, just like anything else.”

  “Well, if it’s a choice, I’d rather brains than looks,” she said, narrowing her eyes at him. Was he stupid? she was thinking. Talk about gifts. God, he was gorgeous. Black hair going silver at the sides—it wasn’t dyed, and she’d liked that. Big dark eyes that looked straight at her. He had a tan, but a lazy one, as if he never really had to work at it. It just happened in between takes.

  What was he doing with a woman like her? she wondered.

  She’d met many people like Ben before as part of the job: presidents, film actors, musicians. Someone else was always managing the environment for them, picking up the tab, keeping fans at bay, telling them names and reasons for meetings. Researching their interview, she read that Ben had two personal assistants with him at all times while he worked. They did shifts, a team of six young people he’d selected, four of them African American. “I get bright kids and give them a chance in the industry. I have a pretty high turnover, but the few who stick it out a year generally get something out of it.” It had been written up in the liberal press as a form of slavery, the rich white guy employing poor black guys to carry his bags. “I don’t care,” he said. “They don’t just carry my bags. My contract with them stipulates that they have to attend acting school, and I pay for that. One of them is about to open on Broadway. Another is doing set design at NYU. It’s not an empty gesture, and it’s certainly not slavery.”

  He wasn’t stupid, she decided . . . and yet those films. “You don’t like superheroes?” he asked when she made a joke early in their relationship.

  “I’ve never given them much thought,” she said.

  “Fair point. What do you give thought to?”

  She found herself uncomfortable, accustomed to being the one asking the questions. “I don’t know. Books.”

  “You say that in a way,” he said, smiling.

  “What way?”

  “Suggesting films are somehow less.”

  “I love the cinema.”

  “Just not the cinema I love.”

  “Perhaps,” she said. “What’s the point of superheroes?”

  “It’s the only thing,” he said. “Good can triumph over evil. Is there anything else that matters in this world? The only stories that matter are the ones that dabble in that.”

  He had a way of reducing arguments and she’d liked that at first. It seemed dependable.

  Ben had grown up in a trailer park outside Sebastopol in California, he’d told her on their first date. His father had left his mother when he was four and his mother decided she wouldn’t work full-time and leave him without a parent to care for him. So they lived in a trailer, surviving on what work she could do while he was at school.

  He never wanted for anything, he said. “Mom was everything. She’s an amazing woman.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me all this for the story?” Victoria asked.

  “Because it’s not the story,” he said.

  “But it’s so great. You came from nothing. It’s the American dream.”

  “Okay, for a start, I didn’t come from nothing.”

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, realizing how insensitive she’d been.

  Ben told Victoria that if his teachers were ever mean to him, his mother would go to see them and explain what they needed to do differently. If they didn’t, she kept him home and then shifted schools. He changed four times because teachers weren’t doing him any good.

  “And then I bombed out of school pretty badly,” he said. “I felt terrible. I knew what Mom had given up for me. She didn’t have much of a life and here I was, blowing mine.”

  Then at an acting school she’d paid for, he’d been picked for a part and then another and another until he won the Zombie World role.

  The photographers hadn’t really left them alone since Ben had been back. If Victoria accompanied him to a function, which she started doing at his insistence now that she’d been named in the press, they were photographed. Victoria didn’t feel comfortable playing the role, but it wasn’t these planned situations that frightened her; it was the unplanned ones. They ran a picture of the two of them in jeans and T-shirts one weekend and called them grungy zombies—Victoria hadn’t even seen the photographer. They took another picture of her leaving the flat for work—again, she didn’t see the photographer—and questioned whether she was putting on weight. The picture was cropped to emphasize her belly.

  It was unsustainable. She knew it was unsustainable.

  “I think if we led from the front foot, released a few pictures of us together, announced the engagement, it would be easier,” Ben had said. “Otherwise, we’ll have to tell them afterward that we got married and it looks like we have something to hide.”

  “Why do we have to tell them?”

  “They’re outside the door because they think it’s a story, you and me. If we tell them the story, we control it.”

  He sounded like his publicist, like any number of publicists Victoria had listened to. “That’s PR speak,” she said.

  “It’s also true,” he said. “If you would just let me look after you like I said, this wouldn’t have happened.”

  He meant quit her job and move to a secure house. That’s what looking after her would mean. A secure house in London, a secure house in New York, a secure house in Los Angeles. That’s all he talked about now. She wouldn’t work anymore. He’d gone from “you need bodyguards” to “you need to stop working and stay home.” But Victoria didn’t want that. She didn’t want to live in a secure house. She wanted to keep working at the magazine and not have her picture in the paper. She wanted, badly wanted, her independence.

  “That’s not an option,” Ben said calmly. Had he told her to shut her mouth? She had a memory of this but surely not. It was all hazy.

  She wanted to go back to how things were before the photographers found them. Maybe she even wanted to go back to a time before she met Ben. She couldn’t believe she was thinking this way. But it was different, she thought. She found herself afraid, inexplicably afraid because she was a journalist and should know better than to fear them.

  Those photographers who wondered if Victoria was putting on weight? They were wrong. She wasn’t putting on weight. She was pregnant, eleven weeks. She’d done three home pregnancy tests, three different brands, in the last week, and each time she sat on the toilet in the white bathroom at home and stared at two pink lines like train tracks to a new future. She hadn’t told Claire. She hadn’t told Ben. She could barely tell herself.

  New Y
ork three months ago. She’d been careless. He’d said it doesn’t matter. We’re getting married anyway. It wasn’t a proposal. It was a statement of what would happen, and Victoria told herself that yes, it was exactly what she wanted. She’d been self-sufficient growing up, boarding school, her father never really present after her mother died. Her grandparents had been there. They’d been wonderful but sometimes she was lonely. There was something missing. Ben had changed all that. He’d wanted to be with her. He loved her. Of course she loved him back.

  The next day he came home with the ring and set the date.

  A child, like Jordan, Max; a child that would grow inside her, that would fuse her and Ben together forever.

  She should have telephoned him. She knew she should have. But she hadn’t.

  Victoria looked out the window to the farms giving way to outer settlements of Paris, green spaces punctuated by giant houses in clumps, the middle-class spread, the remaining trees green against a pale sky. She hadn’t even noticed the tunnel.

  Seventeen

  SYDNEY, 1920

  I walked up the hill from the station to Government House. I saw Mrs. Danby at the kitchen window, scrubbing something in the sink with vigor. I waved and smiled, but a response was beyond her.

  I went in through the same door I’d gone through for my interview just a few days before. I stopped a moment now. Who would think that I, Maddie Bright, would find myself writing letters for a prince? I would have been amazed to serve in the dining room as planned, let alone act as his written voice. And my letters were now on their way to the prince’s men in Australia to be acted on—actions I, for the most part, had suggested.

  The footman who’d shown me where to go for the interview was in the hall. “Mr. Waters is looking for you, miss,” he said. “I’ll take you.”

  He led me to the door of the room where I’d been interviewed. It had been set up as the staff office for the duration of the prince’s Australian visit.

  I thought of the interview, Mrs. Danby and her stony face, Mr. Waters and his stifled laughter. Wasn’t I lucky it had been him? Someone else might not have taken the chance.

  “Come,” I heard Mr. Waters call from within when the footman knocked. He opened the door for me.

  I went in and there was the prince sitting back in a chair with his feet on a desk, his boots over the papers. Mr. Waters was standing at the French windows with his hands in his trouser pockets. He looked handsome in the winter light through the window.

  The prince’s private secretary, Sir Godfrey Thomas, was sitting on the other side of the desk. Helen had pointed him out to me at the national capital site. He was young, not much older than the prince himself. The King had opposed his appointment, Helen said, because of his youth. The prince had insisted.

  Sir Godfrey turned to look at me but didn’t stand up.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” I said to the prince. “I didn’t realize you were here.”

  “No, no, come in, Maddie,” Mr. Waters said, gesturing with his hand. “We need to . . .” He looked at the prince and then out the window.

  On the desk was the day’s mail, another thick wad of letters. They were still coming from Victoria, and now the letters from New South Wales had joined them. Poor Mr. Waters, I thought.

  “We want you to stay,” the prince said. “And your mummy is my old friend! I can’t tell you how pleased I am, Maddie. You are the image of her as a girl. I was just a little boy, and she was so very beautiful. I thought she would be the best big sister for a little prince.”

  “Stay, sir?” I was still on his first sentence.

  “Rupert here needs you but he doesn’t quite know how to tell you. He thinks you might have other plans and he’s not sure your old dad will want to spare you. But I think your mother will be pleased. She was very kind to me.

  “So I’m telling you. I’m your prince. You must listen to me. The empire needs you, Maddie Bright! Doesn’t it, Godfrey? Ned agrees with me, by the way.”

  “Well, yes, sir, he does,” Sir Godfrey said. “But Ned agrees with anything that might advantage his cause, and I think Rupert and I could hazard a guess as to why he agrees on this particular matter.” He had a slight smile as he said it. It might have been mean.

  “Why?” Mr. Waters asked. He had turned to look at Sir Godfrey.

  “I think the colonel wants Helen to himself, doesn’t he? He doesn’t want her working with us, Rupert.” He smiled again and there was no meanness in it.

  “Doesn’t he?” Mr. Waters said.

  Sir Godfrey just looked at him and shrugged. “I notice things. I’m sure you do too.”

  “Really?” the prince said. “Ned? Well, I never. Isn’t he a bit . . .” He didn’t finish the question.

  Sir Godfrey looked across at me. “Actually, Maddie, we were just discussing the idea of you continuing with us, and it certainly has merit.” He glanced over at Prince Edward. “Do come in. Sit down.” Sir Godfrey stood and indicated for me to sit in the chair he’d vacated. I remained standing.

  I had not officially met Sir Godfrey, just seen him in the distance. Up close, his face was sweeter, I thought, with big dark eyes and an aquiline nose balanced by a generous mouth. He was the same age as Mr. Waters or a few years older, I decided. We hadn’t been introduced and now I imagined we were to assume we knew each other.

  “For God’s sake, Godfrey,” the prince said. “Rupert’s say-so is my say-so.”

  Sir Godfrey was Mr. Waters’s boss, so I didn’t really understand what the prince might mean, and Mr. Waters hadn’t said anything since Helen was mentioned. He was looking back out to the garden.

  “Maddie.” Sir Godfrey smiled. “I understand you have been a great help to Rupert here, and to H.R.H.”

  “A great help,” the prince echoed.

  Mr. Waters remained silent.

  “And we value your help,” Sir Godfrey said. “But I also know you came to us in odd circumstances.”

  “Sir?” I said.

  “You were let go from your last position.”

  “Yes, sir, I was.”

  “There was tea.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “On a customer.”

  “Yes, sir.” I looked at him. “But it wasn’t hot, sir.”

  The prince burst out laughing then. “Hear that, Godfrey? It wasn’t hot. Enough said.”

  “If you don’t mind, sir, I would just like to clarify what happened,” Sir Godfrey said. “Do you understand, Maddie?”

  “After all,” the prince added, before I could respond, “we can’t have the heir to the throne at risk of being tea-ed.” He got up suddenly and went over to stand with Mr. Waters. “Oh, look,” he said, “there’s Helen. That’s what you’ve been doing, Waters, ogling the staff. You can’t have her. She’s Ned’s, apparently. Come on. You’ll get Maddie. We just have to convince Godfrey.”

  I had not replied to Sir Godfrey. I had stood there, mute, while he watched me. Only Mr. Waters seemed uninterested in my response. He continued to look out toward the garden.

  It was the prince who spoke, finally. He was still standing next to Mr. Waters by the window. The light was on both their faces. “Forget it, Godfrey. We don’t need to hear the story. Maddie, the empire is calling. What do you say?”

  I was confused. “I still don’t understand,” I said. “Why does the empire need me?”

  “I’m joking, Maddie,” he said. “The empire doesn’t need you. Rupert does. I’m sorry. My joke appears to have fallen flat twice, Rupert.”

  The prince looked at me again. “Rupert is going batty with all this mail. So we’d like you to stay on for the rest of the tour. We’ve had a marvelous few days, largely because Rupert has been able to focus on his job instead of these jolly letters. He’s kept the admiral happy. Godfrey here is my friend again. Even Grigg is leaving me be.”


  He stood and smiled. “That’s good then.” He turned to Mr. Waters. “See? It wasn’t that difficult.”

  “Very well,” Sir Godfrey said. “There is one more thing, sir, while we have Rupert with us . . .”

  The prince was walking toward the door. He looked back, inquisitive.

  “We . . . Rupert and I . . . I’m just having trouble remembering the name, Rupert.”

  “You mean Ruby?” Mr. Waters said.

  “Yes, just so. Sir, Ruby has had to leave us here in Sydney. She won’t be serving in the dining suite for the remainder of our visit. We’ll be getting someone else from Admiralty House, I believe.”

  “Ruby Rex?” the prince said. “Oh, she was good fun. She could dance, Godfrey. Rupert, do you agree with this?”

  “Godfrey said she resigned,” Mr. Waters said. “I thought she was happy, David, but apparently not.”

  “I did have a word with her, as a matter of fact,” Sir Godfrey said. “Mrs. Danby has promised we’ll have someone who’s more suitable for the role.”

  “Ruby left me without saying good-bye?” the prince said. “Hmph.”

  The prince walked past me toward the door. He smelled fresh and new, like summer-cut grass. “Although I am the Prince of Wales, Maddie, at times my aides think I am not competent to make decisions. But you are one decision I feel entirely certain about.”

  He and Sir Godfrey left then, and Mr. Waters and I were alone. He sighed, then walked over to his desk and sat down. He gestured for me to take the chair on the other side, which I did.

  “We leave at the end of this week for the west of Australia, and I want you to come with us and take over as H.R.H.’s official correspondence secretary. Your recompense will befit the position; it’s a senior role. Which reminds me, I must go to the clerk before you leave and see you’re paid for the days you’ve already worked.”

  I was shocked and thrilled at once. I had been happy to help out Mr. Waters and Helen as well as those who wrote to the prince. And the pay would be such a help to Mummy.