Lost Autumn

by Mary-Rose MacColl

  “McIntrick didn’t mention the royalties for Autumn Leaves, which was odd. You’d think that’s the first thing an agent would do. But he just said there was a second novel she wanted us to look at, the long-awaited Winter Skies.

  “I was thrilled but wary. Was it real? What was the novel about? How could we be sure? All of that. We talked, my senior editor and I, and agreed we would proceed with caution and anticipation in equal measure. The letters came soon after my own father’s passing, and Bright was in her late seventies then, so I was cautious on a number of counts. On the other hand, M. A. Bright might have a new novel! Worth a risk, I’d say.” He grinned.

  “McIntrick and I corresponded over several months. We were preparing to meet the author herself—I planned a trip to Australia—and then the correspondence stopped. I was finalizing dates for my visit and I got no reply. I sent further letters to the post office box but, again, no reply. To be honest, I assumed M. A. Bright really had died, and I was sure we’d soon hear from the estate.

  “There wasn’t much more to be done other than start some sort of intrusive search, which was never an option. My father had asked me to respect M. A. Bright’s privacy ahead of everything else. That was the last conversation I had with him about her. It was paramount in relation to M. A. Bright, he said.

  “At any rate, it was not the way of Barlow Inglis to chase her, no matter how good the new book would be for us.”

  He sat back, sighed. “I heard nothing, and so there it lay. Every few years, we’ve followed up with a letter. No reply.

  “Until three months ago. We received a letter, not from Bright’s agent but from a fellow named Shaw, Andrew Shaw, who claims he’s a friend of Madeleine Bright. He used the same post office box address that the agent used fifteen years ago.

  “This Shaw fellow says M. A. Bright has had the second novel for some years and now wants it published. I wrote and asked politely about the delay and he wrote that she’d been tweaking it. That’s the word he used. Tweaking. Fifteen years of tweaking.

  “Shaw isn’t an agent, he says. He knows nothing about books, but he knows M. A. Bright well, he claims. There’s no e-mail, no phone number, just the post office box again. But it’s the same one. I’m more wary than thrilled this time, but a new novel from M. A. Bright after all these years would save Barlow Inglis in the current climate. The long-touted sequel to Autumn Leaves? I’m willing to take that risk. You bet I am. Especially with a lost baby.” He sipped his water as if it was whisky this time, to give himself the courage he needed.

  Victoria looked at him. Was he serious about the lost baby?

  “M. A. Bright wants you to interview her, the letter says.” He smiled. “You know she’s never been interviewed? Not once. And she picked you.”

  “Really? What about when Autumn Leaves came out?” Victoria asked, ignoring the flattery. “The publicity.”

  “In the twenties and thirties, we didn’t care so much about who wrote a book. All press requests came to Bingles and Sir Antony did the interviews. You’d never get away with that now. Talk about a cult of the author.”

  Victoria sat back. “So, have you read the new novel?” she asked.

  “I don’t have it yet, just the first chapter on file which McIntrick had enclosed with his letter.” He leaned down to a red leather briefcase on the floor, flicked it open, and took out a yellowed envelope.

  He handed it to Victoria. She took out a sheaf of unbound paper, a yellowing letter on the front. It smelled not musty but sweet, like honey. “What’s wrong with the t?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.” He sighed. “To be honest, this is all a little beyond me. My degree is in art history. I called Ewan when they mentioned your name.”

  Thanks, Ewan, Victoria wanted to say. It sounded so preposterous. Ewan surely wasn’t taking it seriously.

  Victoria picked up her glass, put it back down, skimmed the letter quickly. My client . . . another manuscript . . . chapter earlier forwarded . . . world rights. She had a picture of Ewan’s face in her mind, a study in mockery. It was probably a hoax, or some wannabe author taking advantage of Finian’s good nature. Why didn’t Ewan just say that instead of sending Victoria along today, especially given she had to get to Paris?

  On the other hand, what if it were real, M. A. Bright producing a new book decades after Autumn Leaves? What a scoop!

  “But how will you test its authenticity?” Victoria asked. “The book, I mean. How will you know Bright wrote it and not this Shaw fellow?” Victoria didn’t know where you’d start. “And what’s been going on for the last fifteen years?”

  “If it’s not genuine, it’s an awfully sophisticated ruse. In the first letters, the ones from the agent, there were details about the publication of Autumn Leaves that only Bright would have known. But you’re absolutely right. We can’t know. I think meeting her will help. She has that voice in Autumn Leaves. That would have to be reflected in the author herself, I think.

  “As I say, initially it was an agent who wrote to me. Ed McIntrick struck me as a pretty tough cookie. I don’t think he’d be easily fooled. He doesn’t seem to be in the picture now though. At the time, when we went searching for his agency, we couldn’t find him, not through other publishers or through the local society of authors. If he was Bright’s agent, she was his only client, I suspect.”

  “And you don’t know Bright personally,” Victoria said. “She must be in her nineties by now.”

  He scratched behind his ear and frowned. “I know. It’s all a bit far-fetched. I’ve made it clear to Shaw that if we are to publish, it cannot be on condition of anonymity. I can’t make it work, not these days. I have to meet M. A. Bright. And she has to stand up as the author. In the end, that may prove too difficult.

  “The newspapers leave her alone now because Autumn Leaves is old. Even if they knew how to find her, they’re not motivated. But if there were another book, I think they would go looking and they would find her. Your folk, I mean. She has to be robust enough in mind and body to withstand that, I should think. I won’t do this if she’s lost her marbles, say, and this Shaw fellow is just taking advantage of her. I don’t want to be accused of anything here. Barlow Inglis couldn’t survive one of those literary hoaxes. I won’t be tricked. Bright must agree to be revealed as part of all this. We must be convinced.”

  “That’s fair.” Victoria sat back in her chair. “So, you’re going over?”

  “Yes. I had hoped I would precede you. But I have commitments here—actually, my son is singing in the opera in Vienna,” he said proudly, “so I’d suggest I follow on from you if the story appears to have veracity. Ewan has agreed that Knight will fund an airfare now, and we’ll fund one later, nearer publication. This one’s a fishing trip, for both of us. But Ewan wanted you involved now because he thought there would be a process story about the new book and you’d need to be in on it from the start.”

  “Really?” Victoria said. Ewan must have some inkling the story could be real to fork out for an airfare. Strangely, Victoria had a feeling that there was truth in this somewhere too. While she was still skeptical, it was too weird to be entirely false. It had to have something to do with the real author. And even if there was no book, it would be a great feature for Vicious: IN SEARCH OF M. A. BRIGHT.

  “Well,” Victoria said.

  “Well, indeed,” Finian said.

  “At least it’s a consistently awful title. Autumn Leaves followed by Winter Skies,” Victoria said.

  “Quite,” Finian said. “Probably no need to say all this must remain between us. You can speak to Ewan, of course, but no one else.”

  “Of course,” Victoria said.

  He breathed out. “I was relieved Bright said she wanted you.” Victoria looked a question. “You’re Michael Byrd’s daughter. Some of your colleagues, I wouldn’t trust.”

  Victoria didn’t respond. Som
e of my colleagues, she thought, I wouldn’t trust. She looked at him. And if I were you, I wouldn’t trust me either.

  Fourteen

  CANBERRA, 1920

  We had stopped overnight near the town of Bungendore and I slept soundly until I heard a kookaburra just before dawn. When the train started to move forward, I wiped icy mist from the window and looked out as we chugged up next to a redbrick building festooned with blue and white streamers.

  The first kookaburra was joined by a chorus, laughing at the world for a few moments, stopping abruptly when a band of sulfur-crested cockatoos wheeled by above the station, their own wails more like an alarm than a laugh.

  There were no houses I could see, and so much bush surrounding the station building that even though it was dressed up, it felt lonely. The grass was yellow now in winter and the scraggly gums a silver-gray green, with just the occasional boulder or dark shrub to break up the monotony. It was a sad landscape, I thought.

  I rose and saw that Helen was already up, her bed made. I dressed quickly, made my own bunk, and went to the office.

  Helen soon came in from the prince’s quarters. “Halsey’s in with him,” she whispered. “There’s trouble. Maybe you should go and find Rup—”

  I was about to ask what she meant when she put a finger to her lips to shush me. She was looking beyond me. I turned around and there was one of the newspapermen Helen had pointed out the day before, Mr. Murdoch from The Times. She didn’t introduce me then, but she did say he was her favorite among the pressmen. “At least he has a brain,” she said. “The others are so easily fooled. If I’d known it was this easy, I’d have become a turncoat years ago.”

  “Morning, Keith,” Helen said now, walking toward Mr. Murdoch, a bright smile on her face. “Are you coming out for breakfast?”

  “I-i-i-s he c-c-coming out, m-m-more to the p-p-p-point?” Mr. Murdoch said. “Th-th-there’s no one in your office.” Helen had mentioned his stutter, and said that in print, he was razor sharp. He refused to toe the line like the other newspapermen. Helen admired him, I could tell.

  “Of course he is,” Helen said. “You’ll be happy, Keith: there’s bacon from the pigs he shot yesterday.”

  Keith Murdoch smiled. He was tall and imposing. The day before, he’d had his hat pulled low over his face, but I saw now his eyes were dark and perceptive. He looked from Helen to me.

  “This is Maddie,” Helen told him. “She’s our new correspondence secretary. And a very good one too. Her father is Thomas Bright.”

  “The poet?” He spent considerable time on the p.

  “Yes, the poet himself. And Maddie has decided to give up her own writing to help us. You might think of such service one day, Keith.”

  “Not on your life,” he said, smiling again.

  Suddenly, I heard a raised voice from within the prince’s private chamber. Mr. Murdoch heard it too, looked inquisitive. I didn’t know whose voice it was, but it was not Mr. Waters or the prince, I was fairly sure. “He’s not in there,” Helen said loudly to cover. “He’s up the front with the admiral. Let’s go and see who else is up.”

  She walked forward, forcing Keith Murdoch back through the train. She turned to me as she left. “Just stay there in case you’re needed to jolly him along,” she said.

  I nodded, although I didn’t even know who she meant me to jolly—hopefully not the prince because all I could imagine was falling through the floor with embarrassment about how stupid I’d been the day before when I met him.

  Ten minutes passed uneventfully and so I went back to work on the letters and soon dropped into the world of the people who looked to their prince for help. I kept hearing voices through the door to the prince’s chamber, low and soothing, a little more excited, occasional outbursts. I couldn’t make out words.

  I noticed people had begun to arrive at the station and the scene became brighter because of them. Music started, quietly at first, growing louder as more band members arrived. By the time the sun was high in the sky, there was an enormous buzz outside the train. I’d been on my own in the office for an hour, every now and then hearing raised voices in the chamber beyond. No one emerged.

  I heard the band play “God Bless the Prince of Wales” and so I assumed the prince had gone out the back of the carriage and down to join the party.

  Helen came back and told me to come down to breakfast. She looked toward the closed door of the prince’s quarters and frowned.

  “Where is he?” one of the newspapermen asked when we came out.

  “Sleeping,” Helen said. “He was up so late reading your stories that he’s having to catch up on his sleep. Come, let’s have breakfast.”

  We had eggs on fried bread at tables set up in the station building.

  “Are they all here to see him?” I asked Helen. There must have been two hundred people around the station now. I had no idea where they’d come from. But not one of them had seen the prince. I thought of my poor mother, how terribly disappointed she’d been.

  “Yes, of course,” Helen said, a smile at the corners of her lips. She turned to Mr. Waters, who had come over to our table.

  “Maddie does have a point, Rupert. It’s happening again. You told Ned once we’d had a week off—”

  “It’s hard to understand the pressure on him,” Mr. Waters said.

  “But all these people have come to see him, and he’s not here. They couldn’t care a fig for the Australian government. They want their prince!”

  “Helen,” Mr. Waters said. “Please.” The look on his face was pained, as if he himself wondered how he’d got here.

  The prince did not emerge at Bungendore and we finished what had become a subdued breakfast and entrained to make the short journey to the railhead nearest the capital site.

  After we stopped again, Helen came through from the front carriages, looked to the closed door, and said quietly, “Ned talked to the admiral. David kicked up a stink about what to wear.”

  “What to wear?”

  “He wouldn’t put on his uniform.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Apparently, the admiral was insisting the prince put on his dress uniform and he refused. The King hates it when the prince doesn’t dress properly, and the prince hates dressing properly. The poor old admiral is in the middle. So there you have it. Rupert can normally soothe him, but he was somewhere else, and I had to deal with Mr. Murdoch. The admiral of the fleet was trying to dress the group captain and it was a total disaster.”

  The admiral’s must have been the other voice I could hear in the prince’s quarters that morning.

  “After the Bahamas,” Helen said, “we had a wire from the King, marked urgent, that came in a diplomatic pouch, about the creases in their trousers, the prince and Dickie. They’d had sharp creases fore and aft when we went ashore, which I assume is front and back. The King said it was raffish. I’m not joking.”

  “Where were the creases supposed to be?”

  “On the sides? How would I know?”

  * * *

  At Queanbeyan, the closest town to the capital site, we stopped again and the prince emerged from the train to attend an official reception with the councilors of the shire. He was wearing a suit of dark brown and a hat, the same brown shoes I’d seen the day before. I couldn’t make out whether there were fore and aft creases in his trousers or not, but he’d had his way on the uniform.

  Admiral Halsey was with him, and Mr. Waters and the colonel. I hadn’t been introduced to the admiral, but he was easily recognizable in his formal naval uniform, dress sword, and cocked hat. He was probably only a little taller than the prince, although the hat gave him an advantage today.

  Colonel Grigg was on the other side of the admiral. His face wore a bit of a smirk, I realized now, or perhaps a slightly bemused look, one eyebrow higher than the other, a small smile.


  “It’s a symbol, sir,” I heard the admiral say.

  The prince looked at him coldly. “You think I don’t know that, Admiral? It’s the fucking symbol I can’t abide, man.”

  “Yes, sir,” the admiral said. “I think the doctor said to use the left hand again today. Give the right a bit more rest.”

  Again, it looked as if an entire town had turned out to see the prince, along with the mayor and officials. His staff kept trying to get him to move to greet the officials, but I noticed the prince spent most of his time talking with the returned soldiers who had started in a loose parade outside the station. He bestowed the warmest of smiles on them, tilting his head to listen to their stories.

  One poor chap made me think of my father. He didn’t look like Daddy, who was taller and more solid of build, but there was something in his manner that was the same. His hands were at his sides and held slightly out from his body, not in fists but not relaxed either. He was wearing the Australian hat, turned up on one side, medals pinned to his chest. He was very thin and about the prince’s height or a few inches taller. They leaned in to each other, as if they were in a private conversation and the crowds around them didn’t exist. I watched the man for a long moment after the prince shook his hand and moved on. The prince had brought comfort in some way. The man’s shoulders were more relaxed, his breathing more easy. The image stayed with me.

  “What a shoddy bunch,” I heard Dickie say as they walked away from the men finally.

  “You’d be shoddy too if you’d seen what they have,” hissed the prince, clearly annoyed at his younger cousin.

  “I’m sorry, David. I was just trying to lighten the load.”

  “Well, don’t,” he said curtly.

  * * *

  Following the reception, the prince returned to the train, emerging not long after in uniform, khaki breeches, long leather boots to the knees, and a coat with an officer’s hat; his chest was lined with medals. Although the uniform fit him very well, he looked more like a boy in his father’s clothes than an officer. It reminded me of the pictures in the newspaper of the day he’d arrived at Farm Cove, when he’d worn the big hat like the admiral’s and the dress sword of a naval officer. Unless you knew it was a uniform, you’d have said he was a child playing dress-up.