Knight News occupied two seven-story brick buildings on Norfolk Square, joined by a glass atrium across a narrow laneway. There were risk-your-life bridges on level three, where The Eye newspaper crossed both buildings, and on level five, where Vicious, the monthly magazine Victoria wrote for, did the same. No one except Mac knew that if Victoria had to go from one building to the other, she never used the walk bridge. She took the elevator down to the ground floor and went up in the elevator on the other side of the atrium, passing Mac each time, which was how she’d come to know him so well.
Mac had four kids who’d all studied at the university, he’d told Victoria with considerable pride, showing her a photograph of each of them over several weeks as she walked between elevators. He and his family had come from Nigeria, where the future was much harder, he said.
Here was the face of social change, Victoria would have written, if she’d done a profile on Mac, one reason New Labour was so important, a living example of why Blair’s free tertiary education policy—the one Victoria’s father had authored—was so necessary. She’d write it without ever seeming patronizing. She’d mention her father’s name proudly, Michael Byrd, the new prime minister’s education adviser and friend.
* * *
Victoria emerged from the lift on the fifth floor and saw, through the glass doors, more people than she’d ever seen in the magazine bullpen, staring up at the few screens mounted on the walls while talking on phones. Large plate-glass windows flooded the space with London’s soft summer light. They’d had an architect in when Harry Knight bought the buildings for his empire, and it showed. The light! The light! Ewan used to say, trying, unsuccessfully, to imitate the architect, who did talk about light more than the average person.
It couldn’t be bad news today, Victoria thought, the sun having found its way through those awful clouds.
Three
BRISBANE, 1981
Your neighbors are worried your house is going to fall on theirs.” Andrew Shaw was leaning back now, as if to inspect the house in its entirety right then to form an opinion of its likelihood of toppling, a smile at the corners of his mouth.
“Uphill,” he said, pointing toward the neighbors. “I just can’t see it. Even if it collapses, it’s not going to go that way. Anyway, they’ve asked me to inspect it.”
“I suppose you’re going to tell me everything that’s wrong with my house.”
“I imagine so,” he said, with a raised eyebrow. “Can I come in?”
“I’m not sure yet,” I said, seeing Ed barrelling unsteadily across the street. “I’m all right!” I called out to slow Ed down, my voice failing me a little. “He’s the inspector!”
“Is this your knight in shining armor?” Andrew Shaw asked.
“I sense a mocking tone,” I said sternly. “His armor may be tarnished, but where were you when I fell off the roof onto those steps?”
“A fair point,” Andrew Shaw said. “Does he need help getting up them?”
“I think he’ll manage, although it depends on how far we are into the day.” I looked across and realized Ed would probably falter. “Yes, that would be good, thank you,” I said.
Andrew Shaw brought Ed—or Ed brought Andrew, Ed objecting with some energy to being helped—and they followed me inside and along the dark hallway past the boys’ room and my parents’ room and my room through the lounge to the little kitchen. Andrew Shaw—“Call me Andy,” he said several times—tested his footing on the veranda floor and again in the kitchen. “Termites?” he said.
“No,” I said. “The only pests are the new neighbors and their like.”
He laughed then. “Well, I’m their builder, so I can’t comment on that,” he said.
“You’ll need a hand, son,” Ed said, a statement not a question, the room clearly moving for him as he swayed against it.
“I think I’ll be all right,” Andrew Shaw said, looking at me and then back at Ed. “Actually, maybe you could hold the torch under the house, if you can get under there.”
“Course I can,” Ed said. It was a job Ed might actually be able to do. Andrew had picked his man and knew his state but treated him kindly.
Poor Ed was thinner every time I saw him. It amazed me that something with so many calories as beer could eat a person’s body up the way it did. Wisps of once-red hair were combed back neatly at least; some days even a comb to his hair was beyond him.
Andrew Shaw said he wasn’t sure how long it would take, as if I had all the time in the world for him, as if he’d made the appointment for today. And perhaps he had. I told him I’d be on the front veranda and not to bother me unless he absolutely had to.
And then, regretting my inhospitableness, I offered tea. “Three sugars,” Andrew Shaw said, which I would have guessed, and Ed said, “I don’t mind if I do.”
“Did you see the news, Ed?” I asked.
“Yes,” Ed said. “That’s why I came over. Are you all right, Maddie?”
“Of course,” I said, although perhaps I wasn’t. I stopped talking then, for tears had started coming out of my eyes.
I see her there, a poor butterfly pinned to a board, a creature even more helpless than those possums in my roof. I watch her sparrow chest rising and falling with each short breath, as if her body is still deciding on flight or fight without her mind having any idea. She gives that lovely smile and talks like she thinks a grown-up should talk, all the while deferring to him with her eyes. Good God! I kept saying to the television, but the television had nothing to say by way of response.
“And after the letter, it’s hard to believe it’s not a sign.”
I thought I might collapse into Andrew Shaw’s arms right then.
“What letter?” Ed asked.
“She wrote to me.”
“Diana Spencer?” Andrew Shaw looked confused. I wondered if he was hard of hearing.
“No,” I said. Had I told Ed about the letter? Perhaps not. “Nothing,” I said. “It’s nothing.”
But it wasn’t nothing. It was everything.
It was Mr. Waters who said to me that the thing about good people and bad people is that they look exactly the same, and it is true.
Take Ed, nodding at me now. You’d be forgiven for making assumptions. He’s a drunk. You’d be forgiven for assuming that’s all he is. But the look on his face as he saw my pain was so kindly, I couldn’t hold his gaze. I found tears in my eyes again and only shook my head and formed my mouth into as tight a line as I could.
I made the tea, transformative of even the most disturbed mental condition, and I carried the two cups to the dining room and put them on the table. Andy was in the ceiling by then, Ed swaying at the bottom of the ladder under the manhole.
The day was heating up; I could hear the tin roof cracking as it stretched.
“There’s possums up there!” I yelled, just as Andy shouted, “Oh shit, rats!” and came back down the ladder.
“Possums,” I said, “and that’s quite enough foul language. This is not a building site. Here’s your tea. I have no cake. And it will be toasted cheese sandwiches for lunch.”
He looked sheepish for a moment. “Sorry. They gave me a fright. More like rats, I’m afraid,” Andy said, looking at Ed, not me. He took a sip of his tea.
“They’re possums,” I said. I wasn’t going to listen to nonsense talk. Rats! Didn’t he know the difference? Rats thither whereas possums thump. And he claimed to be a builder. For goodness’ sake. He wasn’t a builder’s bootstrap.
“I have a book to finish,” I said, pretending not to notice Ed rolling his eyes at Andrew Shaw. Ed thinks the book will never be finished. But Ed is not a writer, so he would not have any idea what is involved.
And the fact is, she’s written to me.
Helen.
She’s written to me after all these years.
I don�
�t have long left, Maddie, she writes. Rupert is gone.
Mr. Waters, I want to say, I’m so sorry I didn’t . . . I’m sorry.
* * *
I have my desk out here on the enclosed veranda because the middle of the house, the second bedroom where I could keep it, started to feel suffocating, as if I were standing on the shoulders not of giants but of the long dead. Ed helps me to move the desk just inside the door when rain’s coming from the north, which is rare. I can drag it in myself, or I could before I broke the leg, but now Ed carries it for me.
Out here, where the front wall is covered entirely with louver windows, I can feel as if I am part of the air, inconsequential and vital at the same time. My words can flow out of my fingers and onto the page and scatter to the street.
Today, I am looking over chapter one. I need to rethink the beginning.
The woman was still sitting outside the church where she’d been since early afternoon, watching and waiting as day faded from her eyes.
Oh God! As if day fades from one’s eyes.
The woman sat on the bench circling the fountain near the church where she would change history.
Really? Change history?
The woman stood up and felt in her knees she’d been sitting too long.
Perhaps she could spy a rat.
Rats, for goodness’ sake.
The little blue envelope is in my top desk drawer, a red-breasted robin in one corner, so like her, that stationery, the loopy M in my name. She was a writer of loopy Ms. You would have guessed that on meeting her.
I know more about rats than most people know about their own faces.
Four
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 manuscript, oo, when I hear from you.
I will have to write without the letter + 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.
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 and their wide-brimmed hats. 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, my brother Bert 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 of a station were more like a gentle mist of morning. The smells—coal dust 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 gov
ernor’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, a gentle smile, and the remnants of childhood freckles still scattered across his nose.
That’s who Andrew Shaw reminds me of, I realize: Mr. Waters; Mr. Waters who, at that time, 1920, seemed old but who, I realize 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 humorless that if you had a humor 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 emphasized certain words. I was in no doubt that she stressed that word successful to make it clear that it and I were a long way apart.
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