Lost Autumn

by Mary-Rose MacColl

  Little did she know there would be no prize for her, not now, not ever, only heartbreak and loss. I could see it as plainly as that. Who was it said, “If youth knew; if age could”? I didn’t know when I was her age either. Now I did know and couldn’t act to save her.

  It was the prince I wanted to look at when I played the tape a third time. You might mistake him for a coyote or a wolf, but you might equally see him as a rabbit caught in headlights.

  Perhaps he had no idea either. But he should have. He was thirty-two years old. He should have known better.

  Ten

  LONDON, 1997

  Victoria went downstairs to the reading tables to go through the morning editions of The Eye. They’d been running them hourly since three a.m., the page-one headline, and pages two, three, five, and six, plus the leader in the latest edition: TRAGEDY FOR THE WORLD.

  There were smiling pictures of Diana, Fayed; a badly crumpled car, unrecognizable as a Mercedes; a tunnel entrance. Fayed died at the scene, along with the driver. Diana died in hospital. Too much blood loss, one story said. The impact had torn her pulmonary vein from her heart, Victoria read in another.

  Victoria went back upstairs to her desk and dialed her father.

  “Byrd,” he said.

  “It’s me, Daddy.”

  “Victoria. I’m just making tea.”

  She looked at her watch. “Yes, I was planning to pop in this morning after the meeting, but I have to go to Paris instead.”

  “They’ve got you on it?”

  “Ewan wants to redo the cover so I’m going over to do an hour-by-hour. I’ve got a lunch first and then I’ll have to go home and pack, so I won’t make tea this morning.” She normally went over on Sundays.

  “Tony’s going to make a statement.”

  “Someone should. Ewan says the family haven’t yet. Alastair must be over the moon.” The PM’s press secretary had no time for the royal family.

  “It’s not like that.”

  “No, I suppose not. Even the diehards here are shocked. Except Des Pearce.”

  “Are you all right?” he asked. She could picture him sitting in his office chair looking out to the front garden—the garden that had been her mother’s.

  “Yes, of course. Why wouldn’t I be? Anyway, the pulmonary veins,” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “Are they the ones that take blood back to the heart?”

  “Yes. But The Guardian already has the line: Diana died of a broken heart.”

  He had never liked the fact she’d left The Guardian for The Daily Mail. She may as well have joined a leper colony. “Good on them,” she said, wishing now she hadn’t asked him. “Anyway, I must go.”

  She told her father she’d pop in when she was home from Paris.

  “Make sure you do, Victoria,” he said. “I love you.”

  Victoria was taken aback. It wasn’t like him to express his emotions. “I love you too, Daddy,” she said after a moment. “I’ll see you when I’m back.”

  It wasn’t until she hung up the phone that she realized. Thirty-six. Diana was thirty-six, the same age as Victoria’s mother when she died—the same age as Victoria now. Perhaps Diana’s death reminded her father of his own long-ago loss.

  It was what that psychologist Brad had said. Victoria had been to see him three months ago, prompted by Claire, who knew of him through a friend. Victoria was stressed and anxious and didn’t know why. Brad told her she was suffering from delayed grief, as if he was some sort of detective of the mind and he’d solved her crime. She was thirty-six, and her mother had been thirty-six when she died. Snap! Brad called Victoria a strong woman, she remembered now, said he liked strong women. She’d laughed with Claire about it afterward. “I like strong women,” Claire had said, making eyes at Victoria.

  But perhaps that had been what had upset her father, Victoria thought. Diana’s dying reminded him of that other loss.

  She nearly called him back but didn’t. What would she say? Her mother was one of the things they didn’t talk about.

  Victoria went back to her desk and took out a blank notebook, intending to sketch some notes. She’d written one of the first features on the problems in the royal marriage when she was at The Daily Mail, in 1987, before anyone was saying anything publicly about Charles and Diana. She’d interviewed five staff at Kensington Palace off the record, and it painted a picture of terrible unhappiness between them. The editor had loved it.

  Victoria sighed heavily. What would she write about Diana now? She hardly knew. It was as if bearing witness, the first job of a journalist, reporting what she saw, was now out of reach to her and she didn’t know why. She couldn’t think, let alone write. Grief, Brad had said, delayed grief. Perhaps he was right.

  She recalled a picture she’d seen of Diana taken just a few months ago. She looked like the shell of a person. Alone. She looked terribly alone. At the time, Victoria had thought of that story she’d written for The Daily Mail, wondering if in some way she’d contributed to Diana’s situation. She’d told herself she was just doing her job. But it had shaken her because she was starting to understand just a little of what it felt like to be pursued.

  * * *

  Ben had said calmly at the start of their relationship, the first morning after they slept together at her flat, that being with him would present a unique opportunity to see what it was like to be on the other side of the notebook and camera. “Like William Hurt in The Doctor,” he said. “He gets cancer and he picks the surgeon he used to make fun of, the one who speaks respectfully to patients, even when they’re asleep on the operating table.”

  Victoria said it was a nonstory, the newspapers wouldn’t be interested in her and Ben, and for the first three months she’d been right. Ben traveled from the US to London to visit Victoria, and she took leave to visit him in New York or Los Angeles. No one knew. But then, one night in early April, they’d been into Central London to see Batman & Robin, George Clooney all wrong, Victoria had thought, although Ben said he was perfect. They were dressed casually. Ben wore a baseball cap and an old jacket so he wouldn’t be recognized.

  They were on the way home. They didn’t see the photographer.

  The next day, Ben’s publicist faxed Victoria the picture from the entertainment pages of the New York Daily News, a blurry shot of the two of them walking along the street hand in hand. Who’s the mystery London woman in Ben Winter’s life? You’d never recognize Victoria in the shot.

  She didn’t mind all that much. In fact, it was a little bit exciting to be the subject of speculation like that. It was funny. They both laughed about it.

  The next week, Ben had gone back to Los Angeles for the premiere of Zombie Armageddon. He’d wanted Victoria to go with him but she had to work, she’d told him. He’d been annoyed about it.

  On the Monday after he left, Victoria was heading out to ride her bike to work. She’d opened the door and suddenly she was blinded. She could hear the flashes firing.

  Her response was to step back. As a journalist, she knew perfectly well what this was, but still, her mind had trouble taking it in. She stumbled and had trouble wrangling the bike inside. She was slow to get the door closed.

  She stood there, inside, behind the closed door. Someone was calling her name from the other side of the door, her front bike wheel on an angle to fit in the small vestibule. Her heart was pounding, she realized.

  She didn’t know any of them from work, not the voices anyway. She couldn’t see their faces because of the flashes. There might have been three. There might have been ten. She didn’t know.

  They wouldn’t come onto the property, she knew, because that would be illegal.

  Once she calmed herself, she figured out they were wanting to photograph Ben. She was wearing a bike suit. Her hair was tucked up under her helmet. You might be forgiven for making the
error. They’d have no interest in her. She wrote about people like Ben, but her own life was of no interest to anyone. When the photographers realized their mistake, they wouldn’t do anything with any shots they’d taken.

  But no, they knew her name. It wasn’t Ben they were after. It was her. How did they know her name? Why were they photographing her?

  She was about to open the door and ask them when she realized, if she did, they’d photograph her again. So she carried her bike back up the stairs, took off her helmet and gloves, and went inside. She peeped out her window and saw a van and two men—standing on the other side of the road now—smoking cigarettes and talking. They made a ruckus for two, Victoria thought. Then she saw another two, farther up the street.

  She decided to wait them out. She e-mailed Ewan. I’m going to work from home this morning, she wrote. She didn’t tell him about the photographers.

  She made herself a cup of tea and toast and started work. They couldn’t use the photographs they had so far. She wouldn’t even be recognizably human in her bike gear, surely.

  By lunchtime, when she went out again, they’d gone. A win, she’d thought. She felt silly then. She could have just asked them what they were doing. They had spooked her.

  The next day, she checked for photographers outside the flat before going down the stairs and then felt even sillier because no one was there. She’d had a telephone call with Ben and she hadn’t mentioned it to him. Now, she was glad she hadn’t.

  When she arrived at work, The Daily Mail was on her desk, opened to page seven. There was a picture, captioned: The Spider-Woman who’s moved in with Zombie Man.

  She looked around the office, wondering who had put the paper on her desk. Heads were all down.

  It was Victoria the photographers wanted after all, she thought, almost dispassionately, as she looked at the picture. Ben had said this would happen, but Victoria hadn’t believed him. He’d said they would find out about her, and they had done. Not only that, they were wrong; she hadn’t moved in with Zombie Man, Zombie Man had moved in with her.

  Her father saw the picture. He called her later that day. He read all the papers in case Blair phoned, she knew. “And so it starts, Victoria,” he said. “Tony says you should get yourself a good lawyer.”

  She had taken Ben over to meet her father for tea one Sunday after they got engaged. Ben was his charming best, and her father sparred with him about something—Victoria couldn’t remember now what it was.

  Still, the meeting had left Victoria strangely uneasy. They hadn’t been over there together again. Her father didn’t mention Ben when she visited. She couldn’t understand why not.

  In the photograph, you could see her bike pants legs and skintight bike shirt, her helmet and plastic goggles. They included her name. They called her Ben Winter’s secret London flame, Victoria Byrd, more a spider than a byrd. More a stick insect, she thought, which would have been funnier. They didn’t mention that she was a journalist, a journalist who’d once written for The Daily Mail, the newspaper that was now invading her privacy to fill a page. She was just the spider woman, the byrd.

  She’d done this to people, hadn’t she? Or something like it. She’d told photographers what kind of shot she wanted. In close to show intimacy, close in a different way to show guilt. More room to create doubt, chin up, chin down, from above, from below. They knew exactly how to photograph a person to create an effect. In a second picture, she was falling back through the door and it looked as if she were trying to hide something. There was a picture of Ben, from their files, his teeth at attention in a perfect smile, an open-necked shirt, a man in control of his destiny.

  There was no story, just the two pictures, the caption, and a single para.

  Is this the new woman in Ben Winter’s life? What Tuesday Mail wants to know is when she’ll start spitting webs from her wrists.

  She looked around the office again. Shame, that’s what she felt. She felt shame.

  Ewan saw her later in the day. “It’s what we do,” was all he said.

  “How did they find me?” she asked when Ben arrived on the Friday.

  “I think one of the photographers followed me from the airport last time,” he said casually. Ben had a car and a driver pick him up.

  “Why can’t you just get a taxi like normal people?”

  “I’m not normal people,” he said.

  “Well, I wish you were.”

  “Let’s not go there,” he said. “It’s a job. It’s a fun job. I like it. Parts of it are stupid. Parts of every job are stupid.”

  “Daddy says I should get a lawyer.”

  “He doesn’t know shit. You have a free press, remember? You’re even part of the free press. So’s he, in a way.”

  That was how Ben saw it. “It would be easier if you’d let my guys look after you,” he said. His bodyguards. His publicity team. That’s what he meant. She couldn’t imagine anything worse. She wanted freedom, she told him.

  “It is freedom,” he said. “We can do whatever we want. Go anywhere, do anything.”

  “Except out my front door,” she said.

  “Yes, except that,” he said. “This is the wrong kind of place, Tori, wrong kind of door.”

  He said she shouldn’t have a front door that opened to the street. She shouldn’t catch the train. She shouldn’t get coffee at Brown’s.

  When she put her foot down and said no, he told her to wait a while and see what happened. It might blow over, he said. But what happened was that it got worse. If you didn’t give them a story, they made one up. He’d been right about that too.

  To people like Ben, the photographers who took those pictures of her were like Victoria; they were involved in the same kind of work. But what they wrote about her and Ben was nothing like what she wrote about people, she tried to tell him, even doing profiles. What they did was to fabricate a story, without even a grain of truth at its core. They would take a picture and invent a story to go with it and make up sources to fill the story. Fiction, pure fiction. She wouldn’t do that. None of the journalists she worked with would do that. It really was different, although when she tried to talk to him about the differences, her arguments all went to water.

  Victoria’s phone rang at her desk, bringing her back to the present with a start. “Hey, babe, me.” Ben. “Just thought I’d call and check you’re okay.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Fine. You?” She was still thinking about the photographers.

  “Did you get my little present?”

  “I did,” Victoria said, realizing she should have said something. The fight last night, the croissant by way of apology. “That was lovely. Sorry. I’m just . . . the news.”

  “Yeah, I heard. Diana.” He breathed out heavily. “I’m on a break,” he said. “Clouds, so we’re waiting.”

  “How is it?”

  “Oh, you know—meaningful.”

  The Resurrect, the film Ben had come to London to star in, was a different role for him, more nuanced than the Zombie World films that had made him famous. “Why me?” he’d asked his agent, Anna, when she’d forwarded the script for The Resurrect. “This guy’s their Coppola.” Ben had agreed to read the script because it meant he could stay in London with Victoria—they’d only slept together once and it made Victoria dizzy that he would make plans around her.

  “Everyone wants you,” Anna had said. He’d put her on speaker so Victoria could hear the call. It was the kind of thing Anna said. Everyone wanted him. If you were an actor you were nothing but an ego wandering around in a pair of Levi’s, or so people thought. “But there’s more than ego in these Levi’s, honey,” Ben said to Victoria after he got off the phone.

  And he laughed. That was the thing that redeemed him. It always did. He could laugh at himself, laugh at all he’d become.

  That was true, wasn’t it? It had been totally
true, Victoria was sure.

  “I’m sorry about last night,” she said on the phone now.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Me too. So sorry, babe. I’m just so mad about it. It’s not fair on you. We gotta fix it. I guess I tried to tell you they’d find us so I was stupidly frustrated. I get so mad at them. That’s who I’m really mad at. I shouldn’t take it out on you. It must be awful when you’re not used to it.”

  “I just didn’t think we rated as news,” she said. “Shows what I know. Daddy thinks—”

  “Yeah, anyway, leave it with me. I’m going to fix it. Gotta go. I love you.”

  “You too.”

  “See you tonight.”

  He was gone.

  She hadn’t told him she was going to Paris. She could ring back, she thought. But she wouldn’t. She knew she wouldn’t.

  She looked up to see Ewan on the other side of the partition, looking at her.

  She jumped.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to scare you, and I didn’t mean to be short with you before. It’s just you’re never late. I think I was in shock. Are you okay?”

  “I’m the one who should apologize,” she said quickly. “I slept in, and I hadn’t seen the news. You were right to be annoyed.” She wiped her eyes. “I was just on the phone to my father.”

  “Is he over the moon?”

  “No, he’s not.” She wondered whether to mention her mother but decided against it. “He never liked the horrible stories about Diana.”

  Ewan regarded her carefully. “And you slept in?” he said.

  “First time ever. I think I must have drunk too much.”

  “Looks sore.” He tapped his own cheek. “You sure you’re all right?”

  She nodded. “I know I’ve been off my game, Ewan, and I’m really sorry.”

  He’d dumped a story she’d written from August, about teaching adults to swim. She hadn’t found the heart of the piece, she knew, and when he tried to restructure it, it just fell apart.