Lost Autumn

by Mary-Rose MacColl

  M. A. Bright moved slowly but efficiently, tipped out the tea Andrew Shaw had made, washed the pot, put more tea in, boiled the water, took down cups.

  Andrew took a tray from a cupboard. It was obvious he knew his way around the kitchen and was accustomed to Maddie being in charge.

  Maddie looked at Andrew at one stage and Victoria thought she saw fear. “I don’t know if I can,” she said, perhaps thinking Victoria couldn’t hear.

  “Course you can, Maddie. It’s just information, remember?” He looked across at Victoria then and smiled. Victoria wondered again if the old woman might have been coerced into the interview, into publishing the book, and Victoria didn’t want any part of that. She wished Andrew Shaw would leave so she could talk to M. A. Bright alone. He’d said he would but now he was hanging around.

  Andrew carried the tray back out to the veranda. Maddie followed, Victoria behind.

  Victoria noticed on the way out from the kitchen a little desk with an old typewriter just inside the door to the enclosed veranda, pencils in a mug and a sheaf of papers, probably the manuscript for the new novel. The writer’s desk. She’d get them to photograph that for the story, she thought, and the backyard off the kitchen where she’d noticed chickens, a vegetable patch.

  Andrew Shaw set the tray down on the little table between the two chairs out on the veranda. “Maddie, I’ll leave you to it.”

  “You won’t stay?” Maddie asked, her eyes wide.

  “Nope.” He bent down and took her in his arms for a long moment, might have whispered something. Victoria worried again the poor old woman was being coerced, although the fact that he was leaving made it less likely. And the writer did not look easy to coerce.

  * * *

  “I like sitting out here and watching the street,” Maddie said after Andrew had left. There were louver windows all along the front wall of the veranda. They were open to the street now.

  “Yes, it’s lovely,” Victoria said. It was a perfect blue day and the air was crisp. Maddie was wearing a cardigan and long woolen slacks with little red boots. Victoria had missed them before because of the blanket. “I like those boots,” she said now.

  “Oh, that’s Sally. She keeps me up with the trends.”

  “Miss Bright . . . May I call you Madeleine?”

  “Maddie.”

  “I’m Victoria.” She thought of Tori.

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Will we stay out here for the interview?” Victoria looked around. The street was quiet, although crows were cawing every now and then. She had taken out her little cassette recorder to tape the interview.

  “Yes, I think so,” the old woman said. “And then our thoughts can scatter to the air and not worry us.” She made little dances in the air with her fingers.

  Maddie had brought out a thin manila folder, Victoria saw now, which she set on the table between them. Victoria sat opposite her, angling her chair to face Maddie. Maddie continued to face the front windows.

  “All right.” She pressed play and record, and surreptitiously put the recorder on the table nearer Maddie than herself.

  “I never met Mr. Inglis,” Maddie said, seeming not to worry about the tape recorder. Often people became momentarily shy when it went on. “It was Mr. Barlow who looked after me. Did you say you are from a magazine?”

  “Yes, I work for Knight News, for a monthly magazine in the UK called Vicious.”

  The old woman laughed at that. “I’m not sure I’m ready to be in a magazine called Vicious.”

  “Oh, we just pipped Vanity Fair in sales.”

  “Vanity Fair,” she said. “I knew someone who worked for Vanity Fair. My father . . .” She smiled. “It doesn’t matter now.”

  “Of course it matters,” Victoria said. “Do go on.”

  “My father was a poet.”

  “Ah,” Victoria said. “So writing is in the blood?”

  “You might say,” Maddie said, smiling. “What do you write?”

  “Me?” Victoria said. “Actually, mostly I write profiles on people who’ve achieved something and, sometimes, people who haven’t achieved something.” She smiled. “But in your case, we’re speaking of an enormous achievement. Autumn Leaves is a wonderful story, and I understand from Finian Inglis that—”

  “It’s a sad story,” Maddie said.

  Hadn’t she said it had a happy ending just before? “Yes,” Victoria said. “Tragic.”

  “Just like Diana.”

  “Yes. So, as I was saying, I reread Autumn Leaves on the plane. Shall we talk about that first?” Victoria knew writers were often difficult to draw out on new work, and she also wanted to get to know Maddie before she broached the new novel and Andrew Shaw’s role.

  “Autumn Leaves,” Maddie said. “Wasn’t I lucky to find Mr. Barlow? That was Mr. Waters. He did that.”

  “Mr. Barlow from Barlow Inglis?”

  The old woman nodded.

  “And Mr. Waters?”

  “Mr. Waters was still the prince’s man then.”

  “Ah, yes, so there has always been speculation about Autumn Leaves being autobiographical.” She thought she’d chance the difficult question.

  “Well, of course it was,” Maddie said. “Not autobiographical, but based on two real people. Everything’s autobiographical when you’re a writer, isn’t it? But really, it went from them to me to you, and nothing can survive that sort of journey unmolested, so it hardly matters, does it?

  “I read your story on Diana and Charles,” Maddie went on, changing the subject without missing a beat, “and I liked that you gave her power no one else was giving her. You rewrote her story for her and I think it would have made a difference to her. I hadn’t thought of her that way before, and it brought me comfort that she could have power over her own destiny even after everything that happened. I hope you were right. I hope she had found her power.”

  “Yes,” Victoria said. “Thank you. And so, getting back to the two characters in Autumn Leaves?”

  The old woman looked at her, smiled and shrugged. “What I did with Autumn Leaves was to show them their story.”

  “And so who were they?”

  “Mr. Waters and Helen,” she said, as if Victoria should already know this.

  Was M. A. Bright addled? Victoria thought then.

  “And now we come to the exploiting part,” Maddie said, smiling across at Victoria. Her gaze became intense. “You have the loveliest cheekbones.”

  “Thank you,” Victoria said, unsure where this was going. “My mother’s. But no one’s ever said that. Getting back to Autumn Leaves, it was published in 1922, is that right? And you wrote it after the war?”

  She nodded. “Now, of course, I’d change the ending. I’d give it a happy ending.”

  Okay, back to the happy ending. “But its poignancy lies in the tragedy for the two protagonists.”

  “Yes, and the war had plenty of tragedy. My father for one. My brothers. I lost everyone.”

  “And it was hard to write after that?” The interview was getting away from Victoria, she thought.

  “Who cares about writing?” she said. “I mean, really.” Maddie Bright stared hard at her. “Who cares?”

  Victoria smiled. “I think I know what you mean. So Autumn Leaves wasn’t based on your life at all?”

  The old woman just smiled.

  “Winter Skies?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Winter Skies would be my story.”

  “It’s a true story?”

  “As true as any,” Maddie said.

  “Barlow Inglis are very excited about the lost baby.”

  “Yes,” Maddie said, becoming serious suddenly.

  “That first chapter is heartbreaking.”

  “Yes,” Maddie said. “It was. I’m not doing very well, am I?” She took a sip of
her tea, offered the plate of cake. Victoria took a piece, put it on her saucer. She didn’t feel like eating.

  “I think you’re doing splendidly,” Victoria said. “I have to tell you that I was a little intimidated. I don’t think I’ve ever interviewed someone like you before; someone who’s never been a public presence and yet has changed so many lives.”

  Victoria noticed the picture of Diana on the table again, and next to it the picture of a pretty young woman in a woolen suit, curly blond hair. “Is that Princess Grace?” she asked.

  “No,” Maddie said. Then, “Will you write something more about Diana?” She glanced at the picture herself.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Did you watch the funeral?”

  “I did, from the street. I watched the coffin pass. It was . . . It was hard to fathom.”

  “I couldn’t bring myself to watch on the television,” Maddie said. “I sat in my own backyard and looked at stars. When I found the Southern Cross, I latched on.”

  She sighed. “Well, here goes,” she said then.

  She sat up straight, crossed her hands in her lap. “I need you to turn that tape off now. I do have some news, but it’s only for you.”

  Victoria picked up the little recorder, pressed pause.

  M. A. Bright leaned over then and reached for the folder, took out a single piece of paper, and handed it to Victoria.

  Forty-six

  WESTERN AUSTRALIA, 1920

  We took the train to Adelaide, where we joined the Renown for the journey to Tasmania. There were mercifully few speeches and the prince seemed to have lost interest in doing them anyway. I would write the text and Colonel Grigg would go through it with the prince. Mr. Waters never commented on the fact that I would not go through the remarks with the prince myself. He never once suggested we do it differently. He and I continued to work together closely.

  Mr. Waters never mentioned Helen either. You would not even have known of his feelings unless you had started writing a story about them. Once Helen left the tour, I started the story that became Autumn Leaves in earnest. I made a study of Mr. Waters, his most endearing mannerisms, the way he looked up from his work sometimes, so hopefully, the way he paused with his pen midair when considering the exact right word. I wrote Helen from my fond memory of her. I did my best to find the best truth of them.

  From Tasmania, we sailed back to Sydney. The prince’s moods continued to fluctuate as they’d always done, up and down, up and down, with the flow of letters from Mrs. Dudley Ward. He left me alone.

  Mr. Murdoch came to see me before he left. He was going back to England but only temporarily, he said. “I can’t tell anyone yet, but I’ve been offered the editorship of the Melbourne Herald. I’ll be looking for writers. I’d be happy to have you join us.”

  “Why?” I said.

  “Because you write well,” he said, as if it were obvious. “You think I didn’t listen to the speeches or read the statements? I know you wrote them. Ned Grigg isn’t at that level. And I want women on my staff for the paper,” he said. “I’d have asked Helen too if she’d been here.”

  I looked at him.

  “It’s nothing like that,” he said. “Women are the majority of my readers. I want women writing. You can start as a cadet.”

  I couldn’t answer him straightaway, couldn’t trust my voice. “All right,” I said finally. “Yes.”

  “I’ll start in January,” he said. “I’ll be in touch.”

  * * *

  It was the day I was leaving his service that Mr. Waters told me that bad people and good people look the same, that you couldn’t tell them apart, that people he expected to be good had turned out to be bad. I don’t know if he was talking about Helen or the prince, or even me. I didn’t ask him.

  But Mr. Waters was right about that. Bad people and good people look exactly the same.

  We docked in Sydney and took a train to Brisbane, stopping en route so that people in dozens of towns could come to see the prince. I went home as soon as we arrived and when Mummy asked me, I told her lies about the tour, the prince, everything. Grand was the word I used repeatedly. Everything was grand. Mummy asked me what I had thought of Prince Edward. Your overall impression, she said, eagerly.

  There was hope in her features, I could see, almost a desperation. The world she’d grown up in, the world she’d had to flee; surely, it remained on the side of goodness, she seemed to be saying. She’d lost her son, her husband for that world. It couldn’t have been for nothing.

  So when she asked me my overall impression of the prince, I swallowed hard. I swallowed down the very last vestige of the child I had been, my mother’s child, and told her, “Mummy, he was the most beautiful creature I have ever seen.” This was not a lie. Much was said later about the prince, and much of it was true. And after his death, the biographers raked over the cold coals of his life, trying to make a flame, of love or hate or pity—how he would have hated that last. They pitied him, a fool for love of a woman not worth loving. That’s what was said.

  I often thought later of my mother. She had no rudder to guide her but her own upbringing, which was so steeped in loyalty to the Crown, fealty to the monarch, that she couldn’t change direction. She could no more have imagined the Prince of Wales as he came to be than I could. Her own young life was so prescribed she had no need of the tools most young women have need of. She had no idea what the world was really like. The only man she’d ever known was Daddy, and he was a good man.

  But my mother asking. My mother! “Beautiful,” I said again. “Like a creature of the deep we can imagine the beauty of but never know.”

  Daddy was quiet, and at first I thought he was angry that I’d gone on the tour, but the truth was that by then he had too many demons of his own to care. He wasn’t getting better, as Mr. Waters had said he would. He was getting worse.

  On my own, I cried and cried. I was glad to be back with my family, back with the little boys, but I felt so different from the Maddie who’d left them that I wasn’t sure I was home at all. It was as if I had changed but they had too. The earth under my feet had changed. Nothing would ever be the same, although I didn’t know that at the time.

  I went to see Mr. Waters at Government House in Brisbane when they came back from a trip to the west of Queensland. The prince was in bad shape, Mr. Waters told me, and they were taking him out to a farm for a few days before they sailed for home. It was as if the whole incident with Helen had never happened. They were back to normal, managing their prince for the good of the empire. There were three daughters at the farm, I read in the paper.

  I remember thinking that for Mr. Waters, this was life. Perhaps he even knew what the prince had done, if not to me, then to Ruby Rivers. He knew what had happened to Helen. He knew what his master was capable of. Helen was right. It almost made him worse.

  I gave him the story that became Autumn Leaves. “You need to read this,” I said. “It’s written about you. It’s the truth.”

  He looked alarmed.

  “It’s all right. I’ll keep your secrets. But read it, Mr. Waters. It’s your story.”

  “Maddie, he does his best.”

  “I’m sure he does,” I said. “Thank you, Mr. Waters. I’ve learned so much.”

  * * *

  It was a month after they’d left that I realized I was with child. I knew from Mummy’s pregnancies the symptoms and I figured out that what he’d done was how you made children. He had made a child in me. I knew I couldn’t tell my mother. I certainly couldn’t tell my father.

  I hadn’t told them about Mr. Murdoch’s offer and I was glad I hadn’t now because I knew that I would not be taking it up. Mr. Murdoch had written before he’d left to go back to London. In my reply I thanked him but was sorry to inform him that I would be taking up another position.

  I told Mummy I wanted to go and v
isit Bea. I’d made enough money from the tour to get us through to the end of the year, and so they were happy to pay the train fare. I took what extra I could without telling them. It wasn’t much.

  Saying good-bye was awful. They thought I was going off to Sydney for a week, but I thought I would probably never return home again.

  I told Bea a lie too, that I’d been offered a position with the prince’s staff and I didn’t want to tell Daddy about it because he’d say no—not because it wasn’t a good opportunity, but because he had a set against the royal family. I told Bea I could study at the university in London. She was more than happy to buy me a berth on a ship and to explain to Mummy and Daddy why she’d done it. “Are you sure you’re all right?” she did say on the night before I left.

  I felt certain that if I told the prince of my condition, he would help. The baby was his, and he would help me. That’s what I believed. He may have been weak, but he would take responsibility for his own child. Surely he would. He was a prince.

  I arrived in London after six weeks at sea. I don’t think I’ve ever missed my family quite as much as I did in those weeks, the little boys especially. I wanted them when they were smaller, one on each knee telling me stories. I wanted to read my father’s rat essays and call him gently back to us.

  By the time I disembarked, the pregnancy was beginning to be obvious. I knew I wouldn’t get work in my state and I had little money with me. I found a hostel near Buckingham house and set out the next day to go and see the prince.

  I had thought it would be easy. He’d always been so available to his staff on the tour, I assumed seeing him would be the easy part. I went to the gates and found a guardhouse to one side on the left where there was an army captain. He came out of his booth and looked at me. He noted my midsection. I asked for Mr. Waters.

  He told me to wait.

  A man I didn’t know came out after about twenty minutes. “I believe you’re looking for Mr. Waters?” he said.