Lost Autumn

by Mary-Rose MacColl

  I don’t mind the children being here. In truth, although I tell them to rest while I work, I like the noise in the house. It brings back memories of the little boys when I was young. It’s the constant noise of children, busy with the living of life right now. I miss my brothers. I miss them still, maybe more with the passing of time, not less.

  Making children rest is impossible. Perhaps I never tried with my brothers, but Andrew told me the children should rest in the middle of the day. Frank made a jungle vine of the venetian cord yesterday, swinging back and forth over his little sister while she emitted shrieks of terrified laughter, until I gave up and let them out of the prison I’d made for them in the spare bedroom.

  I’ve seen it all before, I could tell them, every possible thing a child could come up with, although we didn’t have venetian blind cords when the twins were four and an eighth.

  While the children have played here, Andy has replaced the front stairs, put a beam under the house for some reason I didn’t understand, even after he’d explained it, and had the termite man in to kill the remaining termites. The rats in the ceiling were quickly exterminated by poison thrown up there. He assured me the possums would not eat rat poison. “But we should get them out too,” he said. “I have a trap at home.” He scratched his head, looking up toward the manhole.

  “Possums have to live somewhere,” I said.

  “Fair enough,” he said. He sighed. He is getting used to sighing in relation to me.

  He is shy about sending me a bill, so I have told him I am a millionaire.

  He doesn’t believe me.

  “I worked as a teacher for forty years,” I said, “and I have no dependents and own this house. I can afford to pay you.”

  Andy came out to the garden where the children were playing now. Frank, who’d been trying to climb the pine tree, ran to his father and hugged him around the legs. “Can we do building?”

  Andy smiled. “When we get home.” He laughed and pretended to fall over from the tackle. “Maddie, I reckon I’m done,” he said as he got up.

  “But you’ll be back tomorrow?” I said, a little too eagerly.

  “No, I mean, I’ve finished all the things we agreed I’d do.” He was looking at me with that smile of his.

  I had loved having him and the children each day. I’d hardly noticed what building work Andy had done. For all I knew, he could have stayed under the house running a saw and drill into nothing to give the semblance of building. It wouldn’t have bothered me really.

  “What will the children do tomorrow?” I asked.

  “How do you mean?”

  “While you’re at work. What will they do?”

  “Go back to child care,” he said, as if that was obvious.

  “Sally doesn’t like it, and Frank doesn’t like it much either.” While this was true, it wasn’t the only reason I said it.

  He looked uncomfortable. “Well, I—”

  “Why can’t they come here?”

  “I’m finished here, Maddie. It’s been lovely and all, but I have to get back on the next-door job. The plans have been approved.”

  “So why can’t Frank and Sally come here while you’re next door?”

  “I couldn’t ask you to do that. It’s not fair. And you have your book.”

  “Well, yes, that’s true, but a book takes time. Anyway, it’s not for you to say what’s fair.” I hesitated then, because I wasn’t sure I could trust my voice. “It’s for me.” I set my mouth tight to let him know I meant it.

  He nodded. “I see.”

  Just then Sally came up behind me and grabbed me around the legs. “I love you, Maddie,” she said.

  And so it was settled.

  I became the children’s caregiver during the day while Andrew was at work. He paid me what he paid the childcare center and later, when his business picked up, he paid me more. It was enough, with my pension, so that I didn’t have to dip into my savings, which made me feel independent.

  At some stage, he told me there had been a lie.

  “My wife,” he said. “I wasn’t completely honest with you.”

  “In what way?”

  “She didn’t die. Well, not in the way I said.”

  “I see. She left you?”

  He nodded.

  “And the children.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, okay,” I said.

  “She was killed in a car accident six months after she left,” he said. “Her family blames me. I thought you might like me less if you knew.”

  “You were wrong about that,” I said.

  “Before she died, people used to say she was a terrible mother to leave the children.”

  “People don’t know shit,” I said.

  We sat there together in silence for a while until I said, “I think we both need tea.”

  Twenty

  SYDNEY, 1920

  The day I left my aunt Bea’s and moved into Government House to join the royal tour, Helen and I went into the city to purchase new clothes—for me, principally, although Helen acted as if it were a shopping trip for both of us. All the prince’s staff had a uniform allowance, Helen said, and when she joined the tour, they extended the allowance to frocks and suits “suitable for a royal tour.” I didn’t know if this was true, or if they’d made special arrangements for me, but I was in no position to be proud.

  We went to David Jones on George Street, and Helen helped me pick out two ready-made dresses, silk stockings, and one pair of low heels that would do for day and evening wear. Helen said I could borrow some of her shoes if needs be. She also talked me into a linen skirt and two blouses for day events. Helen wanted a jacket to go with the skirt but I said I could get by with my cardigan. She paid for everything from the tour account, insisting that this was part of the job.

  After we finished shopping, we went to the tearooms farther along George Street, which a footman from Government House had suggested to Helen.

  We had scones and jam and cream with our tea. The only time I’d ever had anything so special was when I’d gone to stay with Bea on my own and she’d taken me to the tearooms near the library.

  “You and Mr. Waters have been so very kind,” I said.

  “Yes, kindness is Rupert’s middle name,” she said.

  “You’re not going to tell me about what happened, are you?”

  She sighed. “I already told you, Rupert and I were in love,” she said.

  “‘Were’?” I said.

  She nodded sadly. “It all feels like an age ago, darling. I really don’t want to talk about it. It’s the dreadful past I never ever think on.”

  I sighed. “Tell me about the hospital then, the one where you worked.”

  “Royaumont?” she said. She struck a match and lit up a cigarette, pushing her plate to one side and dragging an ashtray over. She was the only woman smoking in public, but she didn’t seem to care.

  “Oh, it was a marvelous place. I went over at the start of 1915, just after they opened. I had a car, you see, that my stepfather had bought for me. I think he only bought it to get rid of me, frankly, but that’s another story.

  “Anyway, they gave me a job as an ambulance driver. At first the Croix Rouge said women couldn’t drive in a war zone, but they soon got used to us. Eventually we bought proper ambulances, but at the start you had to bring your own.”

  She took a long draw on her cigarette and blew the smoke above us. “Did I tell you already that I ran the little school for a time?” she said.

  “No,” I said. “I thought it was a hospital.”

  “Yes. But Miss Ivens—she was our chief—was very keen that we do whatever we could to help the villages around the hospital. The schoolmaster from Asnières was off fighting and there was no one in the village who felt able to continue a school. I have a degree
in the arts, and my French is rather good, so Miss Ivens said I could teach the children. I’d never been near a child my whole life except to make funny faces at them so they’d giggle.

  “But dear Miss Ivens knew more than she let on, I think. She was always one for finding things you could do and getting you doing them.” She sighed. “It was marvelous fun. I didn’t know what they were supposed to be learning so we just made it up.

  “I remember one little girl in particular, a dear thing, six years old, her father off fighting, half scared to death the first few days. But she turned out to be very smart.

  “Children are the true gift,” she said then, looking sad again. “That’s certain.”

  “You clearly haven’t spent enough time with my younger brothers,” I said. “They would change your mind quick smart.”

  “No, they wouldn’t,” Helen said. “They wouldn’t. I loved them all.”

  * * *

  I had been working for more than an hour in the office at Government House later that afternoon when I heard someone walk quickly into the room behind me without knocking. I turned around and there was Prince Edward. He was dressed in the long shorts he wore for running, and long white socks, with a button-down shirt and a cardigan. He looked like any young fellow you might meet, perhaps less stylish, closer in age to my brother Bert, sixteen, than his own age of twenty-six.

  “Maddie!” he said. “What a treat.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Just hello,” he said. “I am skiving off today,” he said, “and the admiral is fit to fry a cat about it.”

  I had stood up when he came in and he gestured for me to sit back down, which I did. He took a seat himself in the easy chair on the other side of the room, looking out to the garden.

  “My father has written to me,” he said. “And it’s made me glum. But seeing you has quite cheered me up.”

  “Glum, sir?”

  “I am to buck up.” He sighed. “And my friends; my father doesn’t like some of my friends. He didn’t want me to appoint Godfrey, who he thinks is too young, and he only tolerates Rupert because Rupert’s father is his equerry and so he can’t possibly reject him. And now he’s angry with me for not wearing my uniform to a parade in Melbourne. He saw a picture in the newspaper and said I had brought shame to him and the family.”

  “Oh no, sir,” I said. “I think our parents always wish we were better than we are in some way. And if you’re the Prince of Wales, I imagine that’s multiplied a thousandfold. But do you mind me asking why you don’t like wearing your uniform? It looks very well on you.”

  “No one’s ever asked me that,” he said, looking stern.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, realizing I’d overstepped a boundary. “Sir.”

  He smiled then and his whole face was illuminated. “Oh, don’t be silly,” he said. “It’s a very good question and speaks of an enquiring mind, which I find I rather like. That must be why you write such fine letters for me, eh?”

  He sighed again. “I think it might be that the uniform separates me too much from normal people. My father would see this very differently, mind. He is a king. He understands he was born to be a king. Perhaps I don’t share his confidence about all that, or his confidence in the people’s confidence about us. It’s not as if we’ve earned it, not in any way. And you only have to look across Europe—every one of my cousins either exiled or dead. I didn’t even fight,” he said then. “I wasn’t allowed to. They sent me to the command center in Paris.

  “The last thing the men who did fight need is a royal family expecting adulation. If they need a royal family at all, it’s one that can understand their plight. I can best do that by being among them. My father . . . he puts a great store in doing things properly.

  “Do you know the peculiar thing?” he said suddenly. “I feel terribly comfortable talking to you. Do you suppose it’s because you’ve been me?”

  “I beg pardon, sir?”

  “You write as me. You are me in those letters. Perhaps it makes it very easy to talk with you.”

  I nodded. “Yes, sir, I do understand. I feel I know you because I write as you.” I smiled at him. He really was very sweet.

  “Helen writes my speeches, and she strikes me the same way. With you, I feel it more so because your letters are a better version of me than I am. And yet I don’t feel you ever look down on me—on me as myself, I mean.

  “Actually, Helen rarely makes me better than I am. I’m funnier than she is at any rate.” He laughed, as if he’d made an enormous joke. “She is a dear one, though. She looks after me very well.”

  He drew on his cigarette and blew out, and then ground the butt into the clean ashtray on the side table.

  “But uniforms are a particular problem with me. Perhaps they rankle because I’m not really a soldier, and therefore not really a prince.”

  “You’re more a prince of the people than your father,” I said. “I think even my father would agree with that.”

  “I doubt it. I’d pick him for a republican. The entire New South Wales government are Bolshie, according to Grigg. And Queensland, where you’re from, is supposed to be even worse.” He smiled. “I might be a bit of a Bolshie myself, come to think of it. I do feel for the men.”

  He went on, “Rupert liked your father though, very much, and Rupert is a good judge of character.”

  “Yes,” I said. “He was different before the war. I hope that with time . . .”

  “Yes,” he said. “I hope so too, Maddie.” He looked pained then, as if he took personal responsibility for my father’s plight. I admired him greatly at that moment.

  * * *

  The next morning, I was in the office starting work when Colonel Grigg came in. Without addressing me, he asked Mr. Waters if I might accompany the prince with him on the appointments for the day; if I had more experience of official functions it might help in drafting replies that took account of the political situation. Mr. Waters rolled his eyes toward me, but to Colonel Grigg he said yes, of course. We had time for me to do that now that I’d joined the team for the duration, he said to me. I may as well go.

  I was thrilled to have been asked. On the way down the steps, I told Helen she must tell me what I needed to do. I knew we were to attend a display by schoolchildren at the Sydney Cricket Ground—not so long ago I might have been a participant in such a display—and I wanted to do the right thing as a representative of the Crown.

  “Oh, we do nothing, darling. Not one thing but keep H.R.H. a happy chappie. I’m just so glad you’re coming,” she said. “I’d be bored otherwise. Ned is terribly serious about all this, and David likes a laugh. He’d much rather Dickie was with us, but we can still have some fun.”

  The prince himself had been the one who’d suggested to Colonel Grigg that I be asked, she said. “He likes your spunky nature, I think,” she said.

  There had been a run of fine days for the prince’s visit and again today there was not a cloud in the sky. As we approached the waiting motorcar, Helen stopped me, put her hand on my arm, and said quietly, “Can you be a true darling and sit next to me? I don’t want to sit next to Ned.”

  “Is Ned the one who we need to be on tea alert for?” I said.

  “No, nothing like that. He’s . . . I think he might think he and I . . . It doesn’t matter. He’s just a tricky trick, all right?”

  I nodded.

  Colonel Grigg was in his late thirties, I’d have said. I knew from Helen that he was unmarried and I had wondered about his feelings for her on the Canberra trip. He admired her writing, I knew, but perhaps it was more than that. Sir Godfrey had intimated as much the day we’d arrived back from Canberra.

  In the car, I sat facing the colonel, with the prince beside him. Helen, beside me, faced the prince. On the way through the city, crowds lined both sides of George Street and there were people leaning out the
windows of all the buildings. I had never seen so many people, all looking at our car.

  The prince waved to them as we drove by. “What on earth are they here for?” he said. “This isn’t even a parade day.”

  “They read the newspaper and guess your route, I suppose, sir,” Colonel Grigg said.

  The prince shook his head but kept smiling. “Fools, the lot of them.”

  * * *

  At the cricket ground, the prince was taken by car to the official welcome area. Helen and I remained in the stand with the newspapermen. There were perhaps a dozen photographers behind us, and down in front, a half dozen journalists with notebooks and pencils. The air was full of excitement.

  To our left was the bandstand. The children stood in the center of the ground. From where we were, you could see them milling around like ants and then, suddenly, as the band struck up, they very quickly formed into the Australian flag. It was a tremendous demonstration, as if every single child were connected to a machine that moved them to the right place. Soon the flag dissolved into a mess of color and regrouped into the three feathers surrounded by the colonies. At the bottom was written, in children, Many Happy Returns.

  Songs were sung: “God Bless the Prince of Wales,” “God Save the King,” and then “Happy Birthday,” which the children fairly roared out.

  The prince came over to where we were while the display was reorganizing back to the flag. I was about to wish him a happy birthday—I had thought his birthday was the week before; there had been a holiday to celebrate it—when he said to Helen, “I want to meet the children, but that idiot Davidson is telling me there’s no provision to go among them. Can you fix it?”

  Sir Walter Davidson was the New South Wales governor and the prince found him pompous, Helen had told me. Mr. Waters had had to intervene more than once to avoid a situation.