The True Story of Maddie Bright

by Mary-Rose MacColl

  I may have said this to Mr Barlow, whom I had never met before. I am a woman who killed her baby. I have nothing to lose.

  Mr Barlow only looked at me sadly, as if he understood the weight of my situation and would do anything to make it not so.

  The second time he visited, he brought his sister, who got me out of bed and washed and dressed me. They took me to a hotel to stay until I was strong enough to travel home.

  Mr Barlow told me he would publish Autumn Leaves. He would be so proud, he said. We would together remove the names of the characters—I’d hardly used them anyway—but he must publish, he said, to show the truth. ‘It’s going to cause something of a ruckus with the royal family,’ he said. ‘But I don’t care.’

  I must write that other story too, he said. It must be shared. He didn’t care what anyone thought, even Mr Waters.

  Not because it’s a true story, he said, but because it tells the truth.

  After I arrived home in Brisbane, my berth paid for by dear Mr Barlow, I saw my father’s condition had deteriorated. Instead of getting well, he was more disturbed. In his study, he talked to people who weren’t there, lined the walls with his rat drawings. Mummy was afraid. The boys were the selves they’d changed into to accommodate him, doing their best.

  Within a year, Daddy was gone physically as well as mentally. He took his own life, hanged himself under the house, right about under where I sit to write. A mercy, really, for our father was long gone by then. I missed him so much and for years, even the person he was after the war, who would sometimes show glimmers of his old self, who might have grown happy even if he remained afraid of life. I kept seeing signs he was getting better after I arrived home, but it was just my wishing it were so.

  We never as a family recovered, and I was in no state to help. Daddy was so much the centre of our happiness. We were like a centrifuge then, spinning, but its only effect was to separate us into our component parts. Mummy died, a cancer that started in her left breast. I cared for her through her last days. She knew, I think. She knew I’d had a child. I don’t know how. We never spoke of it, but I felt in her eyes there was a knowing. I’m sorry, she said on her second-last day. I’m sorry I didn’t protect you.

  I did my best to raise the twins, but really I only raised them so that the empire could take them too. And then Bert died in 1949, a heart attack from an inherited condition none of the other boys had lived long enough to discover, and John just two years later in a house fire.

  And so I was alone. There was never enough money to live on from the royalties the book earned, of course—it was even banned for a time, Mr Barlow wrote me—and so I trained as a teacher down at Ithaca, and thank goodness I did.

  In my first month home from London, I used to visit the orphans’ home in Petrie Terrace. I would go to the nursery. You could just wander in and sit down. There was a cutout in the wall and you could sit on a bench and watch the babies sleeping.

  I imagined taking one of those babies home with me. Not having the baby—I didn’t think about that—just getting up and walking into the nursery and picking a baby up and walking out.

  But I knew they’d come and find me. They’d know what I’d done to my own child, and that would be that. I’d go to prison. Here were all these babies with no home to go to, but no one would give them a home with me.

  I think of their journey, those babies. I think of where they’ve come from and are going. Not one of them asked to be born into a world where they would have no roots other than those they put down themselves, where they might pass through life so quickly. This was not a choice any of them made, not my baby, not my brothers, not any of us really. That’s what religion should help you ponder, but it doesn’t.

  You learn to accommodate the past, I suppose, or perhaps the present accommodates you. I must have decided—I mean, I don’t remember deciding, but I must have decided to stop thinking about what had happened, to block it out altogether. Perhaps that’s not quite what I did. But something like that.

  Teaching helped, the children; not because it was a child I lost but because children are hope personified. I didn’t want to write, to find the demons there, but teaching was perfect. There was a time when Autumn Leaves started to earn money and my accountant told me I could leave work now and live off my earnings. I just nodded and smiled. Teaching saved me. I was not about to give it up. I instructed the accountant to separate me from the book’s earnings and completed my will. When I died, the money earned by Autumn Leaves would go to children separated from their parents by death. To orphans. My money would go to orphans. I hope it makes them rich.

  Any teacher with a brain will be able to tell you, within broad parameters, where the children in the class are heading in life: this one to medicine, this one to marriage and children, to alcoholism, despair, to law or bricklaying or murder. It’s not that I believe in destiny exactly. But we become a close enough approximation of the person we are on the road to becoming from an early age, and destiny exists to the extent that there must be a great ledger somewhere with it all written down long before any of it happens.

  The prince’s future was more set down than most. You might forgive him a great deal if you understood the weight he carried from the time he was a small child. A destiny was written for him, a destiny he ultimately sidestepped but never truly escaped.

  When he grew old, to me Edward, then Duke of Windsor, most resembled his father, King George V, more than any of the other boys in the family. He had abdicated and so it was a difficult comparison. His father had spent his adult life as the monarch, duty his principal driver, whereas Edward had done so for less than a year before he’d abdicated and married the divorcee Wallis Simpson, driven by some other feeling than duty.

  When I knew him, he saw himself as a different man from his father, a modern man. I think we all saw him that way. But he looked like his father in the interview I watched and he expressed a deep concern for making sure things were done properly, the thing he had despised most about his father. He talked a lot about the ‘Establishment’ as if, in 1970, he’d just discovered it existed. I wondered then at his stupidity, for I had never thought him stupid when I knew him.

  I don’t believe Edward VIII abdicated for love. Perhaps he wasn’t someone who could love, I think now, for love requires of us that we see another person and I’m not sure he could. Perhaps the prince was missing some part of his humanity that must form when we are very young, the capacity to take love in that allows us to give it back.

  If Edward’s destiny was largely written for him ahead of time, when I first met him, my future was only lightly written, hardly marking the page at all, a journey with many potential roads. I began with such opportunity, in Australia, where we were more free to do as we pleased than in England, where I might have been born to nobility. I began life amid enormous optimism, as big as the sky over Australia, with a good and decent father who would do anything to feed that optimism in his children. I might have studied history and worked for the library as Bea planned for me. I might have been a writer, which was what Daddy wanted me to do.

  But then Daddy went to war, and when he came home there was no chance of education, and Edward was gone from us. And then I went with the prince and Mr Waters and learned the true nature of men.

  It comes down to choices we make, I suppose, within the constraints of the hand we’re dealt. I’m a terrible bridge player. I never managed the strategy. I think the prince might have been a terrible bridge player too, if it came to it.

  The prince’s men though—Sir Godfrey Thomas, Colonel Grigg, even Admiral Halsey, Mr Waters—understood how a hand of bridge might be won or lost. They made sure it was the former when it came to their prince. When I knew him, the prince was twenty-six years old and full of what I mistook for idealism. But now, looking back, I can see he was nothing but a soul in search of a conscience. That soul was run entirely by men who understood how to get what they wanted from the world and did so.

>   What I have done is skirted the life I might have lived, or perhaps I have lived within it, some small version of it so that the me I would have been surrounds me. I can see her there sometimes as I’m falling asleep. She has such courage. She is pouring tea on them again and again whenever they dare bother her. She is strong, invincible. They cannot harm her.

  FORTY-SIX

  Brisbane, 1997

  SHE RANG CLAIRE. SHE DIDN’T KNOW WHAT ELSE TO DO.

  ‘Maddie Bright is my grandmother.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘M.A. Bright, the writer, is my grandmother.’

  ‘Victoria, slow down. It’s three in the morning. Where are you?’

  ‘Australia. I’m sorry. I just … I have to call Daddy, and I don’t know what to say. And Ben.’ She sobbed. ‘Oh God, it’s like a bolt out of the blue, Claire. You were right. I’m sorry I couldn’t see it before. I’ve met this fellow.’ She was crying now. ‘I don’t even like him much, but in two days, he’s shown me what’s wrong, why I have to end it with Ben. The baby, we’ll just have to work it out, but I can’t go back to him.’

  ‘Well, that’s good. Hats off to whoever he is.’ Claire was bleary. Victoria could hear Tony in the background. ‘It’s Victoria,’ Claire said. ‘Go back to sleep.’

  ‘Andrew,’ Victoria said. ‘Andrew Shaw.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘That’s who’s made me see,’ Victoria said.

  ‘What baby?’ Claire said then.

  ‘He’s just a normal fellow. We flirted. It wasn’t like Ben. It wasn’t anything like Ben.’ She knew she’d woken Claire up. She knew she wasn’t making sense. But she didn’t seem to be able to do anything about it. She’d spent time after her meeting with Maddie Bright wandering through the Botanic Gardens. She’d left without waiting for Andrew Shaw and walked until she found a taxi.

  There was a tree, an African tulip, she was told by a gardener, and she stared at the purple flowers for a long time. It was like being drugged.

  ‘I’m pregnant, Claire,’ she said to her friend now.

  ‘Oh, God!’ Claire shrieked. ‘No, nothing, Tony,’ she said. ‘Go back to sleep.’ Then she said, more quietly, breathlessly, ‘Of course. Of course you are. No wonder this has been … Oh, Victoria, I should have noticed. How stupid. I wish I could give you a big hug. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘No, don’t be,’ Victoria said. ‘It’s all become clear now. Yes, it’s been a big upheaval. But you were right, Claire. It’s not going to work. It’s … He can’t come back from what he did, even if he gets better. What was I thinking?’

  ‘That’s right, and we can work this out. I’ll help. We’ll help.’

  ‘I don’t want an abortion.’

  ‘That’s fine. Of course. Have the baby. Whatever. You can join my bad mothering club, membership of one so far, and be unhappy about everything you do, really. Tony can look after it. Well, to the extent he looks after his own kids. Seriously, we’ll make it work, Victoria. Whatever you want, we’ll make it work. Where did you say you were?’

  ‘I’m in Australia. I’m sorry I woke you. I just had to talk.’

  ‘No, that’s fine, I’m up now,’ Claire said. ‘I’m going to make coffee. So if Max needs breastfeeding, too bad. But can we back up? Did you say at the start of this phone call when I was still asleep that M.A. Bright is your grandmother?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Okay, that’s what I thought you said. You mean M.A. Bright the novelist from the twenties, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘You have to explain that one. I’m glad I asked, actually. If I’d got off the phone without asking I’d have figured I dreamed this, because M.A. Bright is a man.’

  ‘Well, she’s never been a man, but now she’s also my grandmother.’ Grandmother. The word had kept repeating in Victoria’s head.

  ‘Claire, you couldn’t put it in a novel,’ Victoria said, ‘because no one would believe it. M.A. Bright wrote Autumn Leaves.’

  ‘I knew that much,’ Claire said.

  ‘Autumn Leaves is about the army officer and ambulance driver who fall in love during the great war. It’s based on a true story. M.A. Bright, Maddie, actually met the real people the characters of Autumn Leaves are based on during a royal tour of Australia in 1920. I don’t know how much of the book is real, but Maddie worked for Prince Edward—he’s the blond one who later abdicated—as some sort of secretary, and so did they, the couple, except they weren’t a couple then. Autumn Leaves is their story, Rupert Waters and Helen Burns, or it would be their story if it were true. Am I making sense?’

  ‘Not really. So you’re related to them, or to her?’

  ‘Her. Both. They raised Daddy and pretended to be his parents and my grandparents, but they weren’t.’

  ‘The Byrds?’

  ‘Yes. They changed their name to Byrd after the explorer. Poppy was a history nut.’

  ‘Hang on. So the Byrds—your nana and pop—were the Waterses? Your nana? I loved your nana, the American. She was funny.’

  ‘Yes. My grandparents were Rupert and Helen. Maddie said those names today, when she was talking about Autumn Leaves, and I swear, Claire, I could almost feel it coming towards me. The truth. It’s woken me up.’

  After the gardens, she had sat on a bridge on the river. Someone stopped, wondering if she was contemplating suicide, she realised only later. I’m fine, she told them. I know the truth.

  And the truth was what had become clear.

  ‘I didn’t know their first names,’ Claire said. ‘Are they named in Autumn Leaves?’

  ‘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 to 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 child 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. Are you with me so far?’

  ‘Sort of,’ Claire said.

  ‘Okay. He was going to leave the prince anyway after he read the draft of Autumn Leaves, 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 rector 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 gra
ve and told police they’d buried the child.’

  ‘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 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.’