Lost Autumn

by Mary-Rose MacColl

  “Oh God, it’s not that,” he said. “Everything all right otherwise?” He looked at her carefully.

  “Oh yes,” she said. “Ben’s back here now, filming, so it’s much better.”

  “Good then,” he said, nodding. “Are you still getting pestered by the lads?” He meant the photographers.

  “Not this morning,” she said.

  “I bet. They’re all on flights to Paris, although God knows what they’ll take pictures of.” He reached out as if to pat her head, pulled his hand back, and turned and left her to it.

  He was halfway back to his office when he stopped and turned. “Winter Skies,” he said. “That’s why I came over.”

  “Huh?” Victoria said.

  “That’s the name of the new book from M. A. Bright. It’s supposed to be a sequel to Autumn Leaves. Just check it out.”

  “I think you called it something else before.”

  “I did, but it’s Winter Skies. I checked. Anyway, glad you’re all right.”

  She sat there for a moment after Ewan was gone. There was something on the edge of her consciousness. She rubbed her eyes. Nothing.

  Eleven

  BRISBANE, 1981

  I am thinking of converting to the Latter-day Saints. They came today—I thought it was Andrew Shaw when I heard the knock—and one of them had the loveliest smile. It is possible I called him Andrew, because whatever I called him surprised him.

  It is now a full month since Andrew Shaw came to the house. He said he would be back, but he hasn’t been back. Perhaps he’s decided to do as I asked and leave me alone. I’ve seen his truck parked outside the neighbor’s house. I find myself hoping he might visit without knowing why as I also know I will be difficult to get along with if he does.

  I saw him get out of the truck last week, early in the morning, and I nearly called out but stopped myself.

  The other Latter-day Saint reminded me of my brother Edward. He could be funny, our Edward; he had such a good way with accents. He used to lean in close and train one eye on me and tell me people were threatened by his intellect. “I am very intelligent,” he would say. For some reason, it never failed to make me laugh. I often wondered: Did he make his jokes over there in France? Did the other boys value him the way we, his family, did? Was someone with him at the end? It’s the kind of thing you wonder about.

  I’m sure he’d have made me laugh about those poor lost boys from the Latter-day Saints.

  * * *

  I had seen the preview for the news earlier in the day, or at least the tail end of the preview. The writing has been going more slowly than I’d hoped. The television is surely the invention of the devil, who hates books.

  On the news preview, she was on the screen again, up close and broken down in tears. It’s a wonder the camera didn’t bump her, although perhaps they had a special lens. Perhaps the photographer was some distance away. She looked forlorn, just like a startled deer, even before she cried, her beige hair and jumper against a rainy English day. I didn’t have the sound on so I wasn’t sure what had happened. But, frankly, it’s no surprise to me. She’s lost weight too, I’ve noticed when I’ve seen pictures of her up at the newsagent. She’s on all the magazine covers looking like she needs to eat.

  They finished the preview with a picture I’ve seen before, many times, the first picture I saw of her after the newspapers got wind of her relationship with the prince. She was at work at the childcare center, wearing a skirt she never bought to be see-through, a skirt you’d never pick as see-through, with one child on her hip, another holding her hand, a young photographer named Danny Brown having his fun by photographing her with the sun behind her so you see her legs straight through the skirt.

  We might put a picture of you in the paper in your underpants, Danny Brown, with Danny Brown stains on them, I said to the screen when the picture came up. I had made a note of his name the first time I saw the picture, in case I might have need. If I met him at the library, for instance, I could whack him with my bag. Who takes a picture of a young girl like that? Is this the world now?

  Nineteen. She’s nineteen years old.

  When I said to Ed earlier today that she was going to be on the news tonight and she’d lost weight, he said it was the wedding, planning for the wedding in July, just three months off. I said she was in a leg trap. Ed didn’t disagree. He’s gone home now. He’s not well, he said, and I noticed he has a cough on his chest. I didn’t say he ought to give up the cigarettes. He probably knows that, and if life teaches you anything it’s that the last thing people need is unsolicited advice about how they might live it. In my experience, even when people ask for advice, advice is not what they want. They want someone to say they’re all right.

  I’ve had no reply to my letter to Mr. Barlow. Perhaps, like Mr. Waters, he’s no longer with us. I imagine he might not be. He’d be well into his nineties now. Perhaps the new owner doesn’t want a second book. I should send a new first chapter, and I would if I’d actually written a new first chapter. It’s the right place to start, I think, and I also think I know where to finish, but the middle is a problem, and also the television, which keeps calling me.

  In the evening, I turned the television back on so I could watch the news itself. I was getting my glasses from my bedroom when I heard a knock on the door. Another member of the faithful! I thought. I had started to wonder if, knowing about the broken leg, or knowing about the letter, some whisper from God above, they were circling like happy reapers, these members of various churches, competing for my soul. It can’t be too much longer, they might say to one another.

  Not now, I muttered. I want to watch the news.

  I left the television on and went out to answer the door. My leg no longer bothers me too much. I am faster every day, and when I opened the door to Andrew Shaw I must have been grinning like a duck with pride at how quickly I’d managed the journey. Andrew Shaw grinned back, although he can’t have known why I was grinning. He’s that sort of person, the sort who grins for no earthly reason, just to return someone else’s grin. We all know those people. They are an insult to grumpiness.

  I tried to whip the grin from my face quick smart and did my best to look stern. Because he was employed by the neighbors I dislike so much, and because he was employed specifically to make judgments about the reliability of my house, I very much wanted to dislike Andrew Shaw. But he makes that task difficult. He is like the sun, making everything around him more bright, including my worst moods, which seem to flow out to him and pass away. This was the source of my conflicted feelings for him. I wanted to dislike him only a little bit more than I wanted to like him.

  Confronted with his lovely smile, my most worked-up stares of anger turn to the kind of idiotic grin I couldn’t get off my face now. It’s something to do with a silent energy our bodies must emit, and his positive energy is stronger than my negative. That’s what I said to Frank at the post office after Andrew Shaw’s first visit, although Frank looked at me oddly, as if I’d suggested he and I get married.

  “I’ve just dropped a written report next door,” Andrew Shaw said, “and I promised I’d drop off a copy of what I found in relation to your place.” He handed me a substantial document, twenty pages at least. “I’m sorry I didn’t get it done until now. I’ve had a few dramas.”

  He’d already told the neighbors that my house was not a threat to theirs, he said, but he wanted to make sure I was aware of what was needed in terms of work. “Just to do the right thing here,” he said. He nodded, looked concerned.

  Oh no, I thought then. He was after a chance. I had allowed myself to hope he was a good man, but he was just the same as the rest of them. Well, I wouldn’t be so easily fooled, I thought.

  There was a summary page; no costings, of course. That would come later, I was sure.

  I glanced at the summary. “It looks to me like so much work is need
ed I may as well bulldoze the house,” I said, more worried about the seven o’clock news than the house, to be honest. When you don’t see the beginning, you never know what’s come before, and I didn’t want to miss her.

  “Not at all,” he said. “It’s an old house in need of maintenance. That’s all.”

  “The back wall eaten out by termites? That’s maintenance?”

  “Not the frame,” he said. “As I said last time, I don’t think there’s structural in that.”

  “But it needs to be replaced?” I said. Back walls wouldn’t come cheaply, I didn’t imagine. I turned my head, trying to hear whether the music had started for the news.

  “Well, treated first,” he said, “and then, yes, there’s work there. But it’s not all bad, Miss Bright. Can I call you Maddie?” He was standing one step down from me, just like the first time we met, which I liked. We were at the same level.

  “No,” I said. “The news is on. Do you want to come in? She’s lost.”

  “Diana,” he said.

  “Yes.” I found myself pleased he remembered.

  “Look, you don’t have to get me to do this work,” he said, without coming in or acknowledging the news. I noticed his hair was longer and more unruly, and he looked tired. “It’s not that. But you should get it done. Is money the problem?”

  Here we go, I thought. He’ll have a friend who can lend me the money. I know about these types. I was about to start saying as much when I noticed his truck parked down on the street was moving from side to side. Not very much, and at first I thought I must be imagining it, but it kept going, which made me think I couldn’t be imagining it.

  “How is it that your truck rocks like that?” I asked, pointing.

  He looked over. “I’ve got my kids in the back,” he said, “and they want to get home.”

  “I should think so,” I said. “How old are they?”

  “Two and four. The dog’s with them.”

  “And you locked them in the truck? With a dog? Have you not seen what happened at Ayers Rock?”

  He sighed. “To be fair, I wasn’t planning to be long, and yes, I need to get them home for tea. How about I call you in the next few days and see how you’re traveling with this?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said, feeling quite stressed about the news and also pressured by Andrew Shaw.

  My brain had been right, despite what my stupid body did by way of response to him. He was just a crook like the rest of them. And his crookedness was about money, the most disgusting crookedness there is, the way of greed, that basest human instinct.

  “Where’s their mother then?” I said, looking down to see a dear little face at the window under the streetlamp. I couldn’t help but smile as a tiny hand came up to wave. I waved back.

  “She died,” Andrew Shaw said then, and his own face, not unlike the little face in the car window, looked as if it might crumple into tears.

  I knew then that he would become a part of my life. Of course he would. Who needs money when children are without their mother? And who needs the news when someone has shared their truth with you?

  Twelve

  ROYAL TRAIN TO CANBERRA, 1920

  I continued drafting replies into the evening, feeling a joy I doubt I could convey here without exclamation marks, which my father would have been shocked to see me use. He was against semicolons too, and colons, come to think of it. He felt commas and full stops were the punctuation of pause needed in order to provide clarity and conciseness. I had inherited his hatred for those other less-used marks, which Mr. Waters found enormously amusing.

  “What’s wrong with the poor old semicolon?” he said, as he inserted one to replace a full stop of mine. I had to confess that I adopted without much reflection my father’s view that writers who used semicolons were indecisive and those who used colons were show-offs.

  “I’ve never thought of it that way,” Mr. Waters said. “I’ve always been a fan of the semicolon. Does it make me indecisive?”

  “I’m sure it doesn’t, sir,” I said. “My father has many quirks.”

  Mr. Waters smiled. “The semicolon,” he mused, shaking his head softly.

  Mr. Waters was a different kind of writer from my father, I was already learning. If Daddy’s verses approached meaning from an angle, providing plenty of points where a reader might create their own from his words, Mr. Waters liked as little ambiguity as possible. He was different too from Helen, who, I was to learn, wanted always to create a ruckus of interest with her words. It was the nature of their tasks, I suppose, but Mr. Waters, who simplified everything I ever wrote for him, was also a kind of poet. It wasn’t that my father had been a writer of the overwriting tendency—far from it—but Mr. Waters brought such simplicity to my writing. It was thrilling in its way. “The prince likes to be direct,” he said that first night. “You’ll be perfect. You have no noise of your own style getting in the way.”

  Mr. Waters had asked the stewards to remove the upholstered chairs and bring in a card table that I could use to sort the mail into piles. He set up the typewriter, which had been on one side of his desk, for me to start typing the replies. I sat by the long window, although it was pitch-black by six p.m., and went to work drafting.

  Mr. Waters was at his desk, writing notes in pencil on the side of a typescript while the train continued west. His job was harder than mine with the moving train. “The schedule for Tasmania,” he said when he spied me looking over—I had tried to look away and pretend that I wasn’t snooping but he only smiled. Everything interested me. I was madly trying to keep a note of whatever I could, thinking I would write it all down in my notebook as soon as I had a chance.

  “We have to cut the number of functions in half,” he said, “and so I am the bringer of bad news to one half of Tasmania, which is now two islands: one that sees H.R.H. and one that doesn’t. They don’t realize that the prince is one young man not twenty. They have him meeting people from dawn until dusk, official balls every night. We specified hours, numbers, everything, but they have misread by a factor of ten what we meant.” He sighed. “This has happened everywhere. It’s such pressure on one person, even a prince. The admiral is doing his best, but he doesn’t seem to be able to control them, and Grigg couldn’t care less really.” He said this to himself more than to me. I just nodded.

  He sat back in his chair, looked over at the door to the prince’s private study. “Let’s hope he likes the speech. We’re running out of time to rewrite it.”

  “Helen said you’ve known the prince for a long time,” I said.

  “My father is his father’s equerry. The prince and his brother, Prince Albert, and I all did our lessons together, and then we all went to school together until they left for the navy.”

  “Helen says you’re the only one Prince Edward listens to.”

  Mr. Waters smiled. “People say things like that, but they don’t understand. He’s born to be king, Maddie. Imagine that load on a person.”

  Just then the door at the other end of our carriage opened. It was Colonel Grigg, the man I’d seen with Mr. Waters in the morning. He was dressed in his military uniform now, khaki, the leather of his shoes and Sam Browne belt gleaming. “Rupert,” he said, doffing an imaginary cap. He wore a pistol on his side. A pistol!

  “Ned,” Mr. Waters said, his expression hard to read.

  Colonel Grigg had to approve all the public speeches and the official meetings, Helen had told me. He was in charge of public functions and liaised with the PM’s office back in London on all aspects of the tour.

  The colonel didn’t acknowledge me as he walked through to the door of the prince’s study. “Are we close?” he asked Mr. Waters, smiling.

  “I think so,” Mr. Waters said. “I hope so.” He looked at his watch.

  “It’s not me, Waters. It’s your lad and bloody Helen. They want poetry. Sil
k purse, I say.”

  “Well, he likes what he likes, Ned,” Mr. Waters said. He glanced over to me. “He likes what Maddie and I write. And we ought to be thankful for that, don’t you think?”

  I beamed with pride that he included me with him as a writer, although I knew the prince was unlikely to have seen anything I’d written yet.

  The colonel had been standing at the door, looking back at Mr. Waters. “I suppose, but getting him to like what we write isn’t the job, is it, man?”

  “It is for me,” Mr. Waters said, and turned back to the papers on his desk.

  The colonel rolled his eyes, looking over at me. I had no idea what he meant to convey, but I averted my gaze and went back to my letter-writing. Already I knew where my loyalty lay.

  The colonel knocked on the door gently now. I heard a voice within call, “Come!” He went in.

  * * *

  Just after seven, Helen came out of the study. Mr. Waters looked up.

  “Ned’s going over it with him,” Helen said. “I have exhausted my considerable store of metaphors, I’m afraid.”

  “Never,” Mr. Waters said. He smiled up at her and there was such tenderness in his eyes. In a very short time, I had become fond of Mr. Waters. He seemed to care so much about what he did, a lot like my father had been before the war.

  “A city on a lake,” Helen said, looking at me. “Isn’t that a line from somewhere? Anyway, we’re debating whether to say lake or body of water. I mean, really. I suppose ‘lake’ might raise the prospect of Arthur and Excalibur, and Ned might see a downside for the empire in that. But the prince is not a man for color when it comes to language. Call a spade a spade, he says.”

  Mr. Waters laughed. “Hear, hear! I’m not a man for color when it comes to language either. Maddie’s father doesn’t like semicolons.”