The True Story of Maddie Bright

by Mary-Rose MacColl

  Claire was still working for The Eye then. She told Danny he was kidding himself if he thought anyone would like what he and his colleagues did to Diana. Claire was cynical about most things but she’d always been in Diana’s camp.

  ‘It’s a job, Claire,’ Danny had said. ‘And I’m fucking good at it.’

  Danny did have a kind of mental swagger, it was true. He was a good photographer, but you had to accommodate the swagger if you wanted him to get a shot for you. It was probably the only way you could do his job and not kill yourself. That’s what Claire said.

  Claire was right about the photographers though. You’d never want anyone doing what they did to you. Victoria was sure about that now.

  Diana was dead? The truth kept coming in and out of focus in Victoria’s brain, her thoughts as thick and slow as molasses.

  She opened her mouth to say something and closed it again.

  ‘Do whatever you need to,’ Ewan was saying, ‘but get moving. I’ll brief you after we finish here.’

  ‘Okay,’ Victoria said. She stood to go. ‘Hang on. I have a lunch today, the one you organised—Finian Inglis.’

  Ewan looked away down to the left and back at Victoria. ‘Oh, yes, of course.’ He considered it. ‘Probably not for us.’ He was tapping a pen on the tabletop absentmindedly.

  ‘Why did you set it up then?’

  ‘I don’t know, because it might be? Fin Inglis runs Barlow Inglis, the publisher, so he’s a somebody. They published M.A. Bright’s Autumn Leaves. He says there’s a second novel, Summer Sky or something.’ Ewan rubbed his chin. ‘He seems pretty convinced.’

  ‘By M.A. Bright?’ Victoria said. ‘Well, that would be extraordinary, wouldn’t it?’

  Ewan was looking out to the bullpen, weighing it up.

  ‘What if it’s genuine?’ Victoria said.

  ‘I’ll eat my hat and yours.’ This was Des Pearce, a personal friend of Harry Knight who had a column in Vicious. It was hard to say exactly what Des wrote about. What Victoria knew was that he didn’t write it very well, and yet month after month he garnered letters, from men mostly, who saw the world the way he did. Right place at the right time was what Ewan said about him. He kept middle-aged men happy, which, apparently, was part of the magazine’s job. Dinosaur was what Claire, who now ran her own PR agency, called Des and old men like him who’d been kicking around newspapers when Lord Beaverbrook was a boy beaver, as Claire was fond of saying. ‘They just don’t know they’re extinct.’

  Des was slightly reptilian in appearance, Victoria thought now as she looked over at him; big eyes, scaly skin, not much hair, a head that sat forward like a lizard, little fingers. Yes, one of those fat lizards on bent legs on that island … what was it called?

  Diana was dead?

  More reptile than beaver, for sure. Reptilian. Was beaverian a word?

  Des interrupted her train of thought. ‘M.A. Bright must be a hundred and fifty if he’s a day,’ he said. ‘It’s sure to be a hoax.’

  Des knew everything, naturally.

  ‘Oh, put a lid on it, Des,’ someone said.

  ‘Ewan?’ Victoria said.

  Ewan sighed. ‘Des is right. M.A. Bright would be old if he served in the First World War. I just had a feeling … Fin wouldn’t call for nothing.’ He took a breath in, held it momentarily and then sighed. ‘Look, do it. If we don’t, he might go to someone else and we’d kick ourselves if we let it go. Fin’s only contacted me because he and my father were at school together. Go and meet him and see what he says. We’ll put you on the first train to Paris after lunch.’

  ‘I can go to Paris,’ Des said.

  The room went silent. Writers stopped clicking pens, keyboarders stopped tapping keys and all eyes turned to Ewan. The thought of Des Pearce covering the death of Diana didn’t bear thinking about.

  ‘No,’ Ewan said. ‘Victoria, you’re going.’

  The noise resumed. Ewan looked at Daniella. She was still on the phone, writing something down. She nodded acknowledgement.

  ‘Yes, do the lunch,’ Ewan said, looking at Victoria and not Des. ‘The dailies will cover the accident scene; we’ll be out-of-date by the time we print if we go for that. When you get to Paris you can file a weather piece for Harry for The Eye tomorrow. We can work out what we need for the magazine once we know the funeral arrangements. We don’t even know yet what the family’s doing. This will be tricky for them. I’m sure we’ll get something later this morning when the Queen comes down. I’ll see what our deadlines look like, how much we can push back.’ They’d locked up on Friday night. It was always a difficult time as Ewan was allergic to closure, a reasonable quality in a writer but a poor one in an editor. Victoria’s profile of a young British actress named Kate Winslet was the cover story. Danny had convinced Winslet to have her photograph taken in front of a painted brick wall at Venice Beach in Los Angeles, angels and devils in the background. It was Danny’s picture, rather than Victoria’s story, that ensured the story was on the cover.

  Victoria had the best job in the world, her friends all said, and she made sure she agreed with them. Ben had said last night that she was the same as the photographers who waited outside their flat every morning. Did he say that? She shook her head involuntarily.

  ‘Victoria?’ Ewan said.

  ‘Fine,’ Victoria said, although she hadn’t heard his question.

  ‘Are we really covering this for the magazine?’ Des Pearce asked.

  Ewan sighed. ‘I think we’ll have to,’ he said. ‘She’s a major figure.’

  ‘But Diana’s so tarnished,’ Des said.

  ‘What an awful word to use,’ one of the younger journalists said. ‘She’s just died.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ewan. ‘Des, forget it.’

  ‘How long do you want me there?’ Victoria asked Ewan.

  ‘Until we know a bit more. I don’t even know how they’ll … bring her home.’

  One of the interns burst into tears and excused herself.

  As Victoria left the conference room, she heard Ewan instructing Danny to head up to Sandringham, where the family had been on holiday. ‘Get the boys. I want the young princes.’

  FIVE

  Brisbane, 1981

  ‘CAN I USE YOUR TOILET?’ ANDREW SHAW WAS STANDING in the doorway to the veranda despite the fact I’d forbidden him and Ed from disturbing me.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ I said. ‘It’s in the bathroom off the kitchen.’ I didn’t turn around. He could have asked Ed.

  ‘I know that book!’ he said, like a child who’s seen a sweet.

  I did turn around then, with as grumpy a face as I could muster. He was pointing to Autumn Leaves on the table.

  ‘My wife read it with her book group before the kids were born. Hers had a different cover. Have you read it?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  I had always liked the original jacket of Autumn Leaves, a daguerreotype of hands not quite joining. You couldn’t tell if they were the hands of one person or two. That’s what I’d liked.

  Mr Barlow had strong views about his jackets, he told me. ‘It is, after all, the way we dress a naked book,’ he said.

  When Mr Barlow smiled, it was a rare gift, as if he were taking you in as his one and only confidante. Perhaps he was like that with all his authors but it made me feel as if I were the only one.

  When I think back, he was so very kind to me. There was not even a hint of impropriety when he talked about nakedness and book jackets. It would never have entered his mind to be improper, not in any way.

  ‘She said it was good but I probably wouldn’t like it,’ Andrew Shaw said now.

  ‘You might,’ I said. ‘You never know.’

  ‘I don’t read much.’

  ‘Well, you may as well not bother living then,’ I said. ‘Now leave me be. I have work to do.’

  ‘What are you doing?’ he asked, ignoring my stern tone, which I didn’t dislike as much as I would have preferred.

  ‘I’m writing
a letter.’

  ‘Who to?’

  ‘A publisher in London.’

  He peered at the typewriter. ‘Who’s Edward McIntrick?’

  ‘Ed, who’s been under the house with you.’

  ‘You’re writing a letter for him?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ I said. ‘More, he’s writing a letter for me.’ I noticed the t in McIntrick was more like a plus sign again. The t jams almost every time I strike it now, and it puts me in a mood. Sometimes it strikes below the line and only partially, as now, looking like the plus sign. Sometimes it just doesn’t do anything, so there’s a space instead of a t. I will send the manuscrip+, oo, when I hear from you.

  I will have to write without the letter t if it keeps going, and that’s going to be a new kind of struggle. For a start, I won’t be able to use struggle, or start.

  ‘Ed doesn’t strike me as someone who would write a lot of letters,’ Andrew Shaw said.

  ‘Well, you never know people,’ I replied.

  ‘Is he a literary agent?’ he asked, pointing to the title under Ed’s signature line.

  ‘Yes and no,’ I said. ‘For today’s purpose, let’s just say he’s moonlighting as one.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s easier to be Ed than me. And he wouldn’t mind.’

  ‘So he doesn’t know?’

  ‘Not precisely. He never has to do anything, just be the name on the letters.’

  ‘That’s very strange.’

  ‘Yes, but I did ask you to leave me alone,’ I said snippily. Andrew Shaw was very difficult to be snippy with, I was finding.

  ‘There’s water under your bathroom floor,’ he said, as if I would have any idea what that might mean.

  I looked back at the letter I’d typed. I’d told Mr Inglis he could reread the chapter I’d sent to Mr Barlow to get a sense of the style of the new book. Perhaps I shouldn’t have said that. Perhaps that won’t even be the first chapter now. Perhaps it won’t be the style. I suppose it’s the same story, but it’s entirely different too.

  Until now, you see, I not only didn’t have the beginning. I didn’t have the ending. Finally, perhaps, I do.

  Sydney Central Station was like an ant colony without a queen that morning long ago, or, in this ant colony’s case, without a prince. I’d left my aunt Bea’s house in Balmain before dawn to catch the ferry, and the sun had risen to reveal a royal day. The prince himself—not Charles, of course, who was yet to be born, but Edward, the Prince of Wales before Charles—wasn’t due for another four hours, a policeman told me. It was a Sunday, the twentieth of June, 1920. I already knew the prince was off shooting wild pigs because that had been in the newspaper, along with a dispensation from the Archbishop of Sydney, it being the Sabbath and shooting requiring a gun and some commentator raising the alarm about the possible threat to the royal soul.

  There were policemen everywhere around the station, more of them even than newspapermen with their big cyclops cameras, their wide-brimmed hats behind. I had watched those newspapermen enviously for some moments when I’d first arrived, daring to long to be among them, to take up my own notebook and pencil and write what I was seeing. At that moment, they had nothing to do but fiddle with their equipment and bother the constabulary, but soon they would have a prince to write about, a bona fide prince to share with the world. Imagine that!

  It was another policeman who read my letter of appointment, delivered the day before to Bea’s house by a servant in full livery—livery a term I learned from my mother after the liveried servant left, Bert my brother asking why a servant would wear his liver not his heart on his sleeve, the rest of us erupting into fits followed by a biology lesson from Bea’s husband Reg, an architect and apparent polymath.

  The second policeman directed me to the platform; Platform H.R.H., as it had been named for the occasion. The royal train was waiting in earnest, porters and guards running about, busy as busy bees. You knew the train because the carriages were painted light blue and ivory rather than the plain brown of the trains we got about in. It was all very grand. The pigeons above us cooed more warmly and fluttered more meaningfully than they might above any other train. The steam and smoke were more like a gentle mist of morning. The smells—coaldust and more universal dust—were more pleasant.

  You see, they really should have had me writing about it!

  It was Mr Waters who’d interviewed me at Government House two days before, with the governor’s housekeeper, a Mrs Danby. Mr Waters was Rupert Waters, the prince’s assistant private secretary, he told me; a man of middle height, with uncontrollable sandy hair that he’d made a fair fist of slicking back, and blue-green eyes like those very pure lakes that come from glaciers you see in the pictures. Very true eyes, and a gentle smile, the remnants of childhood freckles still scattered across his nose.

  That’s who Andrew Shaw reminds me of, I realise: Mr Waters; Mr Waters who, at that time, 1920, seemed old but who, I realise now, was so young, barely twenty-seven. He and Andrew Shaw share soft voices, soft eyes, and perhaps even a belief that the world is overflowing with goodness. That’s certainly what Andrew Shaw seems to assume, and it was Mr Waters’s best quality, even if it destroyed us all.

  Mr Waters is gone now, the letter says. Perhaps he’s been reincarnated as Andrew Shaw.

  The Buddhists, notable for the fact that they are a religion whose followers don’t come knocking at my door, offer a whole different way of seeing, and one I don’t much like, frankly. You go to the university and study comparative religion to learn about Buddhism. It is anti-attachment, which to me is entirely counter-existential. Isn’t attachment the whole mechanism with which we are anchored to life? Isn’t it the same as gravity? I have been unattached for most of my life and, believe me, if it weren’t for Ed, I might actually prefer death by now. Why else would I entertain religious nuts?

  The housekeeper Mrs Danby was the counterpoint to Mr Waters—so humourless that if you had a humour meter it would register in the negative when passed over her. She may well have already learned the skill of unattachment.

  There was a seamstress on the tour, Mrs Danby told me when I asked about uniforms—hoping I wouldn’t have to pay for my own, as I had no money with which to pay—and the seamstress would fit the successful candidate for serving clothes. She stressed that word, successful, and then added that it was unlikely, highly unlikely, that I’d be needing a uniform because only the successful applicant would need a uniform. She was a person for whom the entire field of italics was invented, the way she stressed certain words. I was in no doubt that she stressed that word successful to make it clear that it and me were a long way apart.

  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 advertisement at Government House 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 responsib
ility, 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?’

  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 blonde 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?’