Lost Autumn

by Mary-Rose MacColl

  “No, they’re not. Remember, the nameless hero and heroine? Jack did a thesis on them.”

  “Jack?”

  “Boyfriend. Cambridge.”

  “Oh yes, scruffy. So the Byrds are the Waterses. And how does M. A. Bright come into it?”

  “She had sex with Edward.”

  “Who’s Edward?”

  “The prince. Edward, the one who didn’t want to be king. Mrs. Simpson, but years before.”

  There was a long pause on the other end of the phone.

  “Are you still there?” Victoria said.

  “So, fuck, Victoria, you’re a princess.”

  Victoria laughed aloud. “Yes!” she said. “I suppose I am.”

  “But how did the Waterses, the Byrds, end up with the prince’s baby?”

  “That’s the bit that’s a cracker story,” Victoria said.

  “Yes, because none of it’s a cracker story so far.”

  “I suppose so, but it gets better. It turns out you were right. They are the mafia.”

  “Huh?”

  “The royal fucking family. Maddie was pregnant by the prince, and she followed him to London. When she got there, no money, no anything, he refused to help her. He wouldn’t even see her. She was pregnant and, Claire, they planned to kill the baby.”

  “Hang on. Who planned to kill the baby?”

  “The Queen’s men.”

  “The Queen wasn’t born.”

  “Not this queen, Mary, the one married to George V.”

  “Of course.”

  “I’m serious!”

  “Okay,” Claire said, “so then she had the baby and they planned to kill it, and your grandparents intervened to save the baby and ran off with it. How could they do that?” Claire sounded incredulous.

  “Rupert Waters found out from the prince’s private secretary that there was a child and the Queen’s men were watching Maddie. He, Rupert that is, was furious at the prince. He’d already given his notice because he’d read the draft of Autumn Leaves and so he knew the truth about why his ambulance driver—Helen—had spurned him. Are you with me so far?”

  “Sort of,” Claire said.

  “Okay. So he was going to leave the prince and go to Helen and tell her but then he found out about Maddie. So he had her watched too, separately from the Queen’s men. It was Rupert who went to the church where Maddie was going to leave the baby and he told the priest he was acting at the prince’s behest. He arranged for them to report it as a death. They even buried a sack of potatoes in a pauper’s grave and told police they had buried the baby.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “Maddie told me today.”

  “And she reckons the baby is Michael Byrd, Tony Blair’s adviser and a dyed-in-the-fucking-wool republican?” Claire said.

  “Yes,” Victoria replied.

  “And Autumn Leaves is the story of your grandparents who aren’t really your grandparents. Meanwhile M. A. Bright thinks she is your grandmother?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Hang on. Why are you even there? In Australia, I mean?”

  “Ewan had a call from the publisher, M. A. Bright’s publisher at Barlow Inglis. There’s supposed to be another book, a sequel that tells this story, called Winter Skies. Awful titles aren’t they? They asked for me by name.

  “I came here thinking I was doing an interview with the writer. Turns out there is no Winter Skies, just a chapter she wrote over and over again when she believed the baby had died.”

  “And you believe all this?”

  “No, I know it. I’m sure.”

  “How?”

  “I have the letter. It’s Nana’s writing. It explains everything.”

  “Wow! I mean, wow! So when did she write that?”

  “After Poppy died, 1981. M. A. Bright got me over here to interview her for a new book but really it was to tell me the truth.”

  “Okay, but if your nana wrote it in 1981, why wait until now to contact you?”

  “I think she wants to meet Daddy. I think she knows her time is coming and she wants to meet her son.”

  “Good luck with that.” Claire knew Michael. She’d interviewed him for The Eye when Labour released its science and education policy.

  “I think he will. He might be reserved but he’s terribly kind. And she’s ninety-five, Claire. Her whole family died. I mean, it changes everything for me and for him. I’ve lived a lie. That’s the fucking truth.”

  “It is, Victoria. It is.”

  Forty-eight

  BRISBANE, 1997

  It was the next day now. Victoria had hardly slept after she’d hung up from Claire. She’d been to talk to Maddie again early in the morning. They sat where they’d sat the day before, in the chairs out on the front veranda.

  “I’m in trouble,” Victoria had said.

  Maddie looked at her. “What sort of trouble?”

  “I’m engaged, and he . . . he isn’t right.” She let out a sharp sob, held her breath to stop from crying. “He hit me,” she whispered.

  “Oh, my dear girl,” Maddie said, taking her hand. Maddie’s was cold. Victoria grabbed it with her other hand and held on.

  “Oh,” Maddie said again with such love.

  Victoria started crying in earnest now. Maddie pulled her into an embrace and said, “There, there.”

  Victoria sat down on the floor at her grandmother’s feet and cried then as she hadn’t when she was a little girl, when her mother was gone. She cried and it felt like she would never stop. She said this, her nose and eyes running, the tissue Maddie handed her of no use to stem the tide.

  “Well, that’s possible but unlikely,” Maddie said. “In my experience, we cry for as long as we need to, and not a moment longer.” She kept her hand on Victoria’s back.

  Maddie didn’t ask questions and that was a relief. When Victoria had cried herself out, finally, she blew her nose on Maddie’s handkerchief and wiped her eyes.

  “Better?” Maddie said.

  Victoria nodded.

  “You’ll be leaving him,” Maddie said, as a statement not a question.

  “I know. There’s a baby.”

  “I see,” she said. “How lovely.”

  * * *

  It was later that same day and Andrew Shaw had collected her from Maddie’s and taken her out to a wildlife park. She’d said she’d like to see a platypus, but now she had a koala in her arms. It really was dear, with a sweet, stupid face and chubby little legs, the softest fur, although it smelled musty, like moss after rain. It didn’t look at her. It stared front and center, like a teddy bear preparing for a photo shoot.

  As they were taking the photograph, it pooped in her hand. She didn’t know what to do.

  “Oh dear,” Andy said afterward, brushing the poop to the ground. “That’s not very respectful of an international visitor.”

  Earlier they’d seen the platypus in a tank. It was much smaller than she thought it would be.

  “If you were here another week, I’d drive you up to O’Reilly’s,” Andy said. “There’s a creek on the way where you usually see them.”

  “They’re the strangest animals,” she said.

  “The platypus?”

  “All of them.”

  “That’s why I like Lone Pine,” he said. “They’re making the animals available for people to see.”

  “Maddie told me they gave the prince animals on his tour,” she said. “A kangaroo they took on the ship with them and a koala, but it belonged to a little girl who was devastated to lose it so he gave it back. A lizard. They returned them all before they went home to England. Probably a good thing.”

  “I came here with Maddie a lot when the kids were small,” he said. “She never told me that.”

  They sat on the rive
rbank and ate the picnic he’d brought: egg sandwiches and tea in a flask.

  “Maddie’s better,” he said. “What I mean is, she’s more settled than she was.” There were tears in his eyes. “She might not live much longer but she’ll know she has nothing to be forgiven for.” He wiped his eyes on his sleeve. “She’s very religious. I think she thought she might be going to hell. You were kind about all this.”

  “Kind?” Victoria said. “It wasn’t her fault.”

  “No, but she thought it was.”

  “I don’t know if my father will come and see her.”

  “I don’t think it matters. You did.” He looked at her. “Is it hard, knowing? Would you rather not know?”

  “Do you care?”

  “I do,” he said. “I thought about it before we did this. I wondered, Would I want to know? I decided I would.”

  It had been Andy’s idea to contact Victoria and not Michael. It was easier to ask for a journalist and he figured Victoria, being one generation removed, might find it easier. Poor Finian Inglis would be disappointed there wasn’t another book, Victoria had thought, although she wasn’t entirely sure there wasn’t a book. There was a manuscript on Maddie’s desk and Victoria wondered if it told the story after all. She had been itching to have a closer look.

  “It’s the deception that most rankles,” Victoria said. “I was close to my grandmother growing up, and yet she never told me.”

  “I guess once she’d told Maddie, she felt she’d done what she should. And they were different times. They were scared of the royal family.”

  “Yes.”

  “Not now though. They’d never do that now.”

  She looked at him. “No, although you never know. I have a friend who thinks they’re worse than the mafia.”

  He laughed. “Is that your fiancé?”

  “No,” she said.

  “I notice you’re not wearing a ring,” he said.

  She hadn’t worn her engagement ring since arriving.

  She looked at her hand. “I’m working it out,” she said finally.

  He nodded. “Let me know when you have.”

  “Why?”

  “I might want to know.”

  She laughed. “You never remarried?”

  “No,” he said. “I tried a couple of dates when the kids were a bit older, but none of them . . . Women don’t generally want two kids from the get-go.”

  “Some might,” Victoria said.

  “Well, it’s not The Brady Bunch out there.”

  * * *

  “My father might not want to meet you,” Victoria had said to Maddie before she’d left in the morning.

  “I know.”

  “Will that be all right?”

  “It will have to be.”

  “How do you stay happy, given everything that happened?”

  “Ah, well, I don’t know much about happiness. The children saved me, first the children I taught at Ithaca and then Frank and Sally. It’s impossible to be anything but in the moment when you have forty youngsters to contend with.

  “What I know is I have these gifts. First, Ed, then Andy and Frank and Sally, and now you. You’ve arrived and now I know I can meet my maker and I won’t have to account for killing a child. You’re a beautiful girl and Diana is at peace. And there’s a baby!”

  From Autumn Leaves by M. A. Bright

  ADDENDUM

  LONDON, 1921

  The knock was so soft on the front door she might have missed it. But then the wailing started up and she didn’t miss that.

  She went along the narrow hallway past the study, opened the door.

  It was him.

  In his arms, he carried a child. The child was the one wailing.

  “Where have you been?” she said, taking the child from him without thinking.

  “Not with you,” he said. “I’m so sorry. I’ve left David’s service for good.”

  “No, I mean, where did you get a baby?” She lifted the child onto her shoulder and began to rub its back. Wind? Did it have wind? It settled there at any rate.

  She remembered the women of Asnières, their soldier husbands gone back to war, leaving them with children. She’d done what she could to help, carrying babies around the little schoolroom while she taught to give the mothers a break, her own heart on her sleeve.

  “How did you find me?” she said now.

  “I’m the government.” But he was smiling as he said it.

  Something had changed in him, she thought, and then no, she decided. Nothing would change in him. Her heart hardened momentarily. But then he took his hat off, his hair falling straight into his eyes. She felt a sudden pull of tenderness.

  “Whose baby is it?”

  “Ours,” he said, pushing his hair back.

  “Ours?”

  “We can’t ever say anything different.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Will you marry me?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t have a ring yet.”

  “I still don’t understand.”

  “I love you. I’ve resigned.”

  “What about India?”

  “Some other fool will go to India.”

  “Won’t David need you?”

  “No.”

  “You’ve resigned?”

  He took from his coat pocket a piece of paper. He unfolded it, a page from The Times. He pointed to a story. “This.”

  She took it in her right hand, leaned back so that the baby didn’t fall forward. She read. “A baby died?”

  He shook his head, gestured to the child. His eyes were filling with tears.

  “This is the baby? But why?”

  He put his finger over his lips. “We can never tell.”

  “All right,” she said.

  “Maddie,” he said. His voice choked as he said it.

  “And David?”

  He nodded tightly. “Godfrey knew.”

  “I’ll kill David. How could he?”

  He shook his head. “No,” he said. “We’ll do what we can do. Maddie’s all right. She’s on her way home. I’ve seen she’s looked after.”

  “Does David know?”

  “About the child?” He nodded.

  “What were they going to do?”

  “What do you think?”

  The baby, who had fallen into a deep sleep on her shoulder, stirred now. “They wouldn’t.”

  He nodded, almost imperceptibly. “They think they did.” He gestured toward the newspaper.

  “Godfrey?”

  “No, the Queen’s men.”

  “Oh,” she said. “All right,” she said.

  “All right, we won’t tell, or all right, you’ll marry me?”

  “Both?”

  He grinned. “I’m about the happiest man on earth.”

  She smiled. “Our child?”

  He nodded.

  “All right.”

  From Winter Skies

  EPILOGUE

  BRISBANE, 1997

  She saw him like new as he walked up the air bridge to where people waited for loved ones. He looked lost, reminding her of that other morning, when her mother was gone, and for a moment it felt as if her mother had died all over again that very day and he was returned to that place of grief.

  He came slowly, thoughtfully. He was wearing his travel clothes: neat dark gray slacks, white shirt, navy coat. His curly hair, gone gray, was clipped short and he wore his reading glasses.

  He carried a copy of Autumn Leaves.

  He looked like his mother, Victoria thought, like Maddie. The spitting image of her in the face.

  This was her family.

  She was with her family.

  “Daddy,” she said
. “I’m so glad you’ve come.”

  Andy had waited at the house with Maddie. She was nervous, she said. It will be fine, Victoria had told her. I know it will be.

  But Victoria didn’t know. She knew how difficult her father could be, how much this mattered.

  * * *

  —

  Maddie stood. He was in the doorway, a foot taller than his mother.

  Neither spoke.

  They moved toward each other.

  Writer’s Note

  ON WRITING

  H.R.H. Edward Prince of Wales visited Australia in 1920 and had a train crash. While I researched what has been written about Edward, all the characters in Lost Autumn are fictional. Fidelity to history is not the job of the novelist. We tell plausible whoppers, as Margaret Atwood has said, and that’s what I have done. True story!

  I have been fortunate to have landed where I have in the disrupted world of twenty-first-century publishing. I am indebted to Annette Barlow at Allen and Unwin in Australia, who has published seven of my eight books; she and Christa Munns have made me very proud I am theirs. Tara Singh Carlson in the United States published In Falling Snow and I could not be more happy that she is also publishing Lost Autumn with Putnam in the United States and Canada. Tara was working with Kathryn Court from Penguin when they published In Falling Snow and Kathryn very kindly went on to publish Swimming Home. The people who work in publishing do difficult jobs so very well and most people have no idea what’s involved. They bring us books—and mostly they bring us good books—and we are very lucky they can still manage it.

  My agent in Australia is Fiona Inglis from Curtis Brown and in the United States Daniel Lazar from Writers House and they are like friends on a path that might otherwise be perilous.

  It takes a village and when you are a writer they should all be certified psychotherapists. Louise Ryan and Gerard Ryan and Lib Fletcher have been there for most of my life; Suzi Jefferies, Theanne Walters, and Lenore Cooper too now. Rebecca Lamoin has been an unexpected gift to my creative soul, and Andrea Fox makes me think differently.

  Stace Callaghan is the invincible summer in the quote. Shar Edmunds has restored my faith in a good world, which I find I do not want to live without. Kim Wilkins has supported many writers, including me, and is my sister on the road. Cathy Sinclair walks up a mountain with me and doesn’t give advice, sometimes not even if I ask for it.