Lost Autumn

by Mary-Rose MacColl

  He was of his generation, she told herself in her teens, when she wanted to hear stories about her mother, in her early twenties when she wanted to know about men, in her thirties when she wondered if she’d have children. Her father wasn’t able to talk about his feelings and when he was deluged by grief, he cauterized his heart rather than try. He was affectionate, up to a point, and kind, but he wasn’t really present. He was Joyce’s Mr. Duffy, living his life a short distance from himself.

  Sometimes, she’d look up from reading and catch him looking at her, and she’d see the deep sadness on his face. She’d understand what he’d lost. She’d think, I look like my mother and it pains him. She wished she looked different. She cut her curls short, dyed her blond hair chestnut, and took to wearing contact lenses instead of glasses.

  It didn’t make any difference. When she first took Claire to the house, Claire saw a picture of Victoria’s mother and said, with Victoria’s father there: “Oh my God, is this you?”

  * * *

  As she went through the front gate to her father’s door now, she had a stab of memory of her mother when Victoria was very small, nursery school–aged. There had been a dog that had got off its leash and had run at Victoria, right outside the gate. Her mother had pushed Victoria out of the way, putting herself between Victoria and the dog, and had been badly bitten on the hand. Victoria thought she’d be in trouble for somehow causing the dog to attack them. But her mother was laughing through her tears. It must have been the shock. “Oh God, that was so wildly exciting,” her mother said, holding on to her injured hand.

  When the dog owner caught up, Victoria’s mother gave him a piece of her mind, but to Victoria she only said that she would always protect her like that. “I’m so scared of dogs,” her mother said. “Did you know that? Mummy is so scared of dogs. But not when they run at you, Victoria. Not at all. How’s that for biology?”

  She would know what to do now, Victoria was sure.

  Victoria’s parents’ house had hardly changed since her mother died. The only addition was the handrail they’d put in for the small flight of stone steps when her grandmother came to live with them after her grandfather died. The front door was still painted the same light blue her mother had chosen, faded now and grimy.

  Victoria let herself in. “Daddy?”

  “In here, darling.”

  He was in his study, as he always was, the only room that looked out across the front garden. Her mother had been the gardener and her father had left it untouched, save the gentle pruning done by Victoria after the neighbors complained. Victoria had also engaged a lawyer to tell the neighbors to leave him alone. It would have been easier to employ a gardener, Claire had said, but Victoria didn’t want to. The garden might be grown over now but it brought some comfort still, she thought. Her father would sit in his office and look out. If it made him feel even a little better, it was worth being a bad neighbor for. What did it matter to them anyway?

  “What are you working on?” Victoria said when she saw her father. She threw her coat on the little chair that had been hers as a girl, parked her overnight bag next to it.

  “Oh, this and that.” He smiled. “A paper for the education wallahs.”

  “I thought you were the education wallahs.”

  He smiled genially. “Used to be, but now they’re in government, they’re bringing in the young guns.” Victoria knew her father was less busy now because he called her more often. Not that he and Tony were no longer close. But everyone wanted to advise the new PM, and her father had never been one to put himself forward. He’d wait until Tony called. Victoria suspected Tony was calling less and less.

  “Will we have tea?” he said.

  “Lovely.”

  They went out to the kitchen. He didn’t ask about Paris.

  Victoria made tea and they carried their cups back to the study. Her father sat at his desk, turning the office chair to face her. Victoria sat in her old easy chair, too small for her now, so she was at a lower level.

  She picked up the framed photograph of her mother from the table, the one Claire had assumed was Victoria herself.

  Her father frowned.

  “Daddy, do you miss Mummy?”

  “Of course,” he said. He looked nervous, as if unsure what she was going to say next.

  She put her cup and saucer down on the table beside the photograph. “It’s just . . .” She burst into tears.

  “Victoria, are you all right?” His face softened. He pulled his chair toward her.

  “Clearly not,” she said, composing herself as best she could. “I don’t know if I’m happy.”

  Tears were still coming out of her eyes. She wiped them, took a breath in and held it until she stopped crying.

  “At work?”

  “I don’t feel I can write anymore.” She tried her best to smile. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to arrive and fall apart. Probably not what you need at all.”

  “Diana?” he said. “It’s upset you?”

  She nodded.

  “Well, you were always kind to animals.”

  “I’m sorry?” she said, not understanding.

  “You always wanted to take in stray animals. Remember the crow?”

  When she looked up at him, it started her crying again.

  “No,” she said, “I don’t.”

  “It had fallen from the tree in the front, your mother’s pear. Remember? The pear never produced any fruit. She was so much more hopeful than me.” He looked whimsical then. And sad, Victoria thought. She wished she hadn’t come. She was only making things worse for him.

  “Oh yes, I remember,” she said, smiling as brightly as she could. “And I do know the tree. You can’t see it anymore for the hedge.” She sniffed. “We have a baby crow at home at the moment. I didn’t remember that other one. I wonder why not.”

  They sat quietly for a moment.

  “I wasn’t enough. I know I wasn’t,” he said sadly.

  “What made you think of the crow?” she asked.

  “You’re not tough, Victoria. Intellectually, you are, but there’s something soft in you. Maybe you’re in the wrong job.”

  “I should become a vet?”

  He laughed. “No, but I know it hasn’t been easy. I know I’m not easy.”

  “No, you’re not,” she said, smiling through her tears. “But neither am I, and you were mother and father both. You did well, Daddy.”

  He was shaking his head. “I know that’s not true, my dear, and I don’t mind that it’s not. I just wish . . .” He put his teacup down.

  He extended his hand toward her but stopped midair.

  “Nana and Poppy were there for the rest,” she said. “I did fine.” She was smiling through the tears, which had started again.

  “They were. Victoria . . .” He was frowning.

  “Yes?” She looked up.

  “Nothing. It’s nothing.”

  “Are you sure?”

  He nodded. “It’s just this paper I’m working on. It can wait.”

  “Okay, Daddy.”

  The moment was gone.

  She picked up her cup, sipped tea. “You like Ben, don’t you?”

  He didn’t answer straightaway. “I don’t know him very well,” he said eventually.

  “But you like him so far?”

  “I do,” he said. “I do. Do you, Victoria?”

  “Of course.” Why would he ask that?

  He nodded. “Good then.”

  As she was leaving, he said, “When your mother died, I couldn’t write, not for months. The grief, I expect. The only other times I have trouble writing are when what I’m writing doesn’t agree with who I am. I think that’s what I was trying to say before.”

  At first she thought he was criticizing her, the kind of writing she did, but later she t
hought back to what he’d said. It was entirely true.

  Thirty

  BRISBANE, 1981

  The Wesley Hospital at Auchenflower sits high above the Brisbane River. It’s more like an airport than a hospital, with plush furniture, carpets, and soft pinkly papered walls. In the foyer there’s a fancy cafeteria and a flower shop. I bought Ed a little bunch of daisies but gave them to a woman in the lift who was crying.

  In the hospital, they didn’t comb his hair right, parting it on the left when he always parted it on the right, and it made him look like a stranger. I didn’t feel I knew him well enough to fix it myself, but I brought his comb and mirror and left them on the table with a picture of him.

  He looked so small and slight there in the bed. “I brought you a flask,” I said.

  “You’re the best, Maddie.”

  They wouldn’t give him alcohol because it was bad for his liver, but I couldn’t imagine why they’d care. He was going to die. He wouldn’t need his liver. I gave him the flask but he only took a tiny sip then put it away from himself.

  The nurses kept thinking I was his wife, even though we had explained several times that we were neighbors. He blushed once when one of them said I could stay in the room overnight if I wanted.

  * * *

  On the last day . . . Oh, I can’t think of it without tears coming into my eyes. He was always thin but now it was like a different face, a different person who’d emerged from the Ed I knew.

  His father had come to visit once and had sat there, stony-faced and likely drunk. I made Andrew Shaw go and tell him when Ed passed. There would be a funeral at the enormous church at Rosalie; Andrew and me, Ed’s father, the Catholic priest and a nun from the convent. The children from the school formed a guard of honor for the coffin. I have no idea why. And he was gone.

  * * *

  Ed was the only person I had told everything: partly because he was a drunk and unlikely to remember, and partly because there was something good in him that even drink couldn’t destroy. I watched his eyes widen and narrow as I told the story from start to finish.

  “That’s the story you should write,” he said at the end, nodding slowly in the way of the drunk. “It’s a great story.”

  I wondered then if he thought I’d made it up.

  “It was me,” I said.

  “It’s a great story,” he said again, and I was left none the wiser as to what he meant.

  The only thing I didn’t get to tell him about was the letter and then it was too late. He’d probably have said it wasn’t as good a story. People like stories about overcoming adversity, and they even like tragedies. I’m not sure what they think about trickery.

  * * *

  I didn’t have the heart to keep going with the book after Ed died. My heart was somewhere else, I suppose; back with the dead. It’s a place my heart knows well.

  I stopped writing to Mr. Inglis, too, as it seemed disrespectful to pretend to be Ed now that he’d passed, although you might wonder why I didn’t think it was disrespectful to appropriate Ed’s identity before he died. I stopped writing to Mr. Inglis, put the book away, and didn’t reply to letters I received. I knew enough to know they’d give up eventually, as they’d done at the beginning.

  I had written back to Helen. I thought of writing again, but I didn’t know what to say.

  I would let bygones be bygones, as I’d told her I would. I would make my forgiveness real. This is the choice we have in life. The Buddhists are entirely right, even if they are so damn superior about it. We can harden our hearts and miss the life that’s ours, or we can soften and forgive and find something tender and real in the middle of ourselves.

  Lady Diana Spencer married Prince Charles in front of all the world but me, for I couldn’t bear to watch. I took myself to bed and stayed there for a week before I picked myself up and told myself I must live the life I’d been given.

  I didn’t have Ed.

  I didn’t have my family.

  I was afraid to take another step.

  But Andrew Shaw and Sally and Frank needed me.

  It was enough for a life. Surely it was.

  Thirty-one

  LONDON, 1997

  Victoria had been home for an hour when she heard the downstairs door, voices, Ben farewelling his driver. They hadn’t spoken on the phone again since the night before in Paris. She heard his tread heavy on the steps. And then his key in the door. She looked up. There he was in the doorway.

  She would never tire of that face, she thought, but it was followed so quickly by dread that it took her breath away. She couldn’t at first speak to greet him.

  “You’re home,” he said, smiling.

  He’s been drinking, she thought.

  “I am,” she said, shaking off the fear.

  He came in and leaned down and kissed her. “Wanna eat out?”

  “I have to work,” she said, waving her fingers over the keyboard of her computer.

  He was fine, she thought, relieved.

  Martha was winding herself around Victoria’s legs, crying softly.

  “Diana?”

  She nodded.

  “Okay, I’ll go and get takeout.”

  “Great,” she said. “Are you all right to drive?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing,” she said, feeling fearful again. “I thought you said you were having drinks tonight, and that’s why you came home with the driver.”

  “I always come home with the driver. Are you all right?”

  “Fine,” she said. “Trying to write this piece for the magazine.” Ewan had said he wanted an eyewitness account of Paris to lead with. “It’s harder than you’d think.”

  “I bet,” he said. “Come on, let’s go out to dinner. We can go back to that place . . . What was it called? The high-end one?”

  “Le Gavroche?”

  “That’s it.”

  “You think they’ll have us back?” She smiled.

  He looked angry suddenly, inexplicably. “What the fuck does that mean?”

  Her smile died. “Just that the maître d’, that horrible fellow, didn’t like us.” Her heart was racing now.

  “You mean he didn’t like me?”

  He had raised his voice, and she realized she was afraid of what he might do.

  She was afraid of Ben.

  “That’s what you mean, isn’t it?” he said. “They didn’t like me. And you don’t like me much either. You don’t even tell me where you are anymore.”

  Victoria chose her words carefully. “Ben, that’s not what I meant. They were the problem, not you.”

  “Is that right?” he said.

  She shook her head. It was as if a different person was in the room now. She did not know this person. It was not Ben.

  But she did know this person.

  She put her feet on the floor. She put her hands by her sides, made her shoulders relax. Somehow, she knew in her bones the one thing she mustn’t show was her fear, a fear that raged under the surface of her skin and threatened to break out of her and fill the little kitchen.

  Martha was crying in earnest now.

  Victoria looked out the window. “Ben,” she said, “let’s not do this. Not tonight. Let’s have a night that’s just you and me. Not our demons.”

  He sat down heavily in the chair opposite her. Just as quickly as he’d entered the room, the monster had left. “I’m sorry,” Ben said. “I really am, honey. I don’t mean to do this. I just . . . I love you so much, and I know the photographers are driving you nuts.”

  “And I love you,” she said, looking him in the eye. “We can weather the photographers. Can’t we?”

  She felt a flutter in her belly.

  “We can,” he said. “And Cal can help. I talked to him today. He’s already written
to The Daily Mirror about the last picture. And I called Brian Martin at The Telegraph.”

  “What for?”

  “To tell him we’re engaged,” Ben said.

  Thirty-two

  PERTH, 1920

  After the ball, I went upstairs with Helen to get changed. I was feeling embarrassed about what had happened with the prince, but also a little thrilled.

  She sighed. “Oh, Maddie, there’s going to be trouble. How could you be so stupid? I told you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t pretend. For a start, the prince danced every dance with you and so now they want to know who you are and how he came to know you. I’ll do my best,” she said, “but you should have refused him.”

  “But, Helen, I—”

  “Keith Murdoch told me he saw the prince kiss you. Kiss you? What were you thinking, Maddie? I’ll do what I can but I have to warn you, it might get rough.”

  “‘Rough’?”

  “There’s the problem with your last job.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You were fired. It won’t take much digging to find that out. I imagine your cafe owner will be more than happy to talk to the newspapermen. I’ll try with Keith. He’s reasonable, but he saw it with his own eyes.” She sighed. “David is not to be trusted, Maddie. Do you know what I mean? I’ve been trying to tell you that.”

  “Do you mean he’s a candidate for a pot of tea?”

  “Exactly,” she said.

  “But he danced with me because he likes me,” I protested. “He likes both of us. We’re on his team. He would never act improperly. Even Mr. Waters says so. He’s a prince, Helen, and he is fond of me. He and I talk.”

  She laughed, not her lovely childlike laugh but a harsh laugh I didn’t think I’d heard before. “You need to wake up,” she said. “There is no way on earth that’s why he danced with you. He danced with you because he likes to dance with young women and that’s not all he likes to do. Remember Ruby?”