The True Story of Maddie Bright

by Mary-Rose MacColl

  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 travelled 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 July, 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 recognised.

  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 recognise 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 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 it 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 realised.

  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 realised 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 Victoria. How did they know her name? Why were they photographing her?

  She was about to open the door and ask them when she realised if she did, they’d photograph her again. Victoria 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, further up the street.

  She decided to wait them out. She emailed 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 recognisably human in her bike gear, surely.

  By lunchtime, when she came 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, open at page seven. There was a picture, captioned: The Spiderwoman 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. 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 on the Sunday after they got engaged. Ben had made a joke about not knowing if he should have asked her father’s permission before proposing. It fell flat. Her father warmed to him, though, just as Victoria had. 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, realising 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 apologise,’ 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. When did you come in?’

  ‘I got a call about two from Harry. A photographer called him, he said. He had a pic of the wreck to sell. He didn’t know much, only that there’d been a crash. They were operating, we heard next, at around three, I think. It was supposed to be minor. That’s what the P.M.’s office was saying. And then Alastair Campbell phoned Harry to say she died.’

  ‘I noticed they made the second edition,’ Victoria said.

  He grimaced. ‘There was a picture.’

  ‘A picture?’

  ‘Her,’ he said softly.

  ‘After?’

  He nodded slightly. ‘In the car. The agency pulled it before Harry saw it.’

  ‘Thank God. He’d have run it.’

  ‘Yes, he would have.’ He smiled. ‘And you slept in?’

  ‘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. ‘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.

  EIGHT

  Sydney, 1920

  HELEN POINTED TO THE PILE OF LETTERS ON MR WATERS’S desk. ‘Oh God, there’s all this as well. I think that’s only today and yesterday. He hasn’t even put it on the correspondence desk. I have a speech to finish by this afternoon and there’s some government chap wanting a photograph approved. I don’t have time.’

  ‘Are you American?’ I said. I’d thought that was her accent before but now I was less certain. She might be English after all.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Good guess! My mother anyway. She remarried when I was ten and we moved to England, so hardly anyone picks the accent. It’s all over the place. Since coming on the tour, I’ve become British, or Welsh—Prince, Wales—but at home in New York I become quite the American.

  ‘Actually, when the prince asked me to do this, I was on my way back to New York.’ She picked up an envelope absently, took the letter out.

  ‘I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with you now,’ she said then. ‘There’s a chief steward somewhere but I don’t think he’s back on the train yet. He went to Government House to chastise the cooks over something I don’t care about. There are two other girls and Fanny, whose place you’ve taken. Well, enough said.’

  Perhaps she had poured tea on someone, I thought.

  ‘Is Mr Waters nice?’ I said. I had liked him very much. I hoped he wasn’t one of those sorts of fellows.

  ‘Rupert,’ she said softly. ‘Rupert is all about loyalty.’

  She started to read the letter she had removed from the envelope. ‘This one. Poor fellow was denied access to the speech the prince gave at the university in Melbourne. He’s a graduate and they couldn’t manage to get him an invitation. I mean, really. He served with the Fusiliers. What should the prince say? I think he takes every war injury personally. It absolutely exhausts him.’

  ‘He should treat the fellow to
a train ticket to the next speech he gives.’

  ‘Yes, that’s rather good. Excellent, in fact. Of course that’s what he should do. Aren’t you the clever one? He’s a prince. He can do anything. The minions are part of the dominions, of course. Can you draft the letter and we can tell someone to arrange it?’

  ‘All right, I will.’

  ‘And then, while we’re waiting for the steward, why not just go through and see if you can sort them into some sort of order? I’ve really got to draft his speech for tomorrow. Our prince must deliver some remarks that the colony will think appropriate.’

  He could start by not calling us the colony, I didn’t say.

  Helen sat me at the desk to start reading the pile of letters. We talked through two or three and agreed what I’d do and then she left me there to go to her own office to start work on the prince’s speech. She told me to come and find her if I had any questions.

  I quickly lost interest in the world around me—what would happen, when I’d get my uniform, where the kitchen was, why the steward hadn’t come for me—because the letters received by the prince were so engaging. I entered the worlds of these people who had written to someone who might care. Their families were not unlike mine. They wanted to tell their stories to the prince who had touched their hearts. Perhaps that was why my mother had insisted we come down here. Perhaps she wanted some acknowledgement of what our father had lost, what we’d all lost.

  There were so many people harmed. That was the thing that struck me powerfully, skimming the letters. You would never have known it that first day of the prince’s visit, looking out at the sea of people in Sydney who were captured by the great joy of the visit. But there were letters from mothers, from fathers, from brothers and sisters of those who’d fallen; loss the experience they had in common.

  From what Helen had said, the prince would want to help them if he could. I wanted to help them too, and that first poor fellow, the one who’d missed the talk, gave me an idea. We could lend a hand where possible, and acknowledge what people had written where there was nothing to be done.