The True Story of Maddie Bright

by Mary-Rose MacColl

  Harry had a point. If people didn’t want to know, they wouldn’t buy the paper and the editors would lose their jobs. It was their job to sell papers because increased circulation led to increased advertising which made their money. Simple as that.

  But led by Knight, led by Victoria herself, when she thought about it, they’d taken the gloves off in terms of the royal family. Some time between when Diana married Charles and now, what they reported about the royals changed. There was no longer any such thing as going too far. The public interest had always had a dark side, but now newspapers fed it. Perhaps it was news, but sometimes what they reported was without even the most basic respect for human dignity.

  Where would it end? her father asked. Where does the public interest become uninteresting, or worse?

  It ended in a Paris underpass, Victoria thought bitterly now.

  It had bothered Victoria when Ben said that she was no different from those photographers who waited outside the flat. She knew he was wrong, but she also knew he was right.

  She hadn’t called him before she left London. She knew she should have. He’d be annoyed that Ewan had been the one to tell him she’d gone. He wouldn’t like it, she knew, and that was the reason she didn’t call. She didn’t want to have to explain herself.

  ‘You know, I only took this role because you told me too, Tori,’ he’d said at some stage last night, and it had irked her, not least because she hadn’t told him to take the role. If she were honest, she’d been relieved to be back in her flat without Ben after she’d left him in New York the last time. She felt less anxious on her own, she realised. Then she felt guilty for thinking this way. He was her fiancé. She should want to be with him, shouldn’t she?

  She did want to be with him.

  Didn’t she?

  They would be married in two months. The invitations would go out next week. New York, at Victoria’s insistence; the middle point between Los Angeles and London, and everyone could have a holiday at the end. He’d wanted a gala at his ranch in Wyoming, but she said they’d honeymoon at the ranch, just the two of them.

  Ben wanted Victoria to quit her job once they were married. He’d said it before and last night he’d become angry about it. He didn’t like Claire either. That was what he’d said last week. Victoria wanted Claire as her matron of honour. They’d been friends since Victoria started at The Daily Mail. Ben said Claire was a smart mouth. That was after the second time he met her—dinner at Claire’s place, Jordan banging on saucepans, Max wailing in Tony’s arms, Tony watching Ben with a mixture of adulation (the Zombie movies) and suspicion (Tony had adopted an overtly fraternal role in Victoria’s life after he married Claire, not altogether unwelcome but not much help with Ben). It was true Claire was a smart mouth, but she was only a smart mouth because she was so smart. When Victoria said this to Ben, he said, Whatever. I don’t like smart mouths.

  The conductor was standing in front of her, Victoria saw, wanting to see her ticket. ‘Sorry,’ she said. She found her ticket and he checked it and kept going.

  It was Victoria’s job that was the main problem now as far as Ben was concerned. The photographers had found them, as he had said they would. If she’d listened to him at the start, none of this would have happened, he’d said last night. That was his logic.

  She’d told Ben she didn’t sign up for this. It was a threat, wasn’t it? She didn’t mean it to be a threat, but of course it was a threat. I didn’t sign up for this so now I can opt out. That’s what would come next, wasn’t it? Was that what she was thinking?

  After the first picture ran of Victoria in her bike gear, Ben came back from Los Angeles and the photographers came back with him. The day he landed, they were in front of Victoria’s flat in the morning. She took the fire escape stairs at the back of the flat and went out into the garden. She climbed over the fence into the yard behind, taking treats for the dog. She walked down the side of the house to the street and from there to the station. Ha! she thought. She’d fooled them.

  And then, she and Ben were going for a run early on the Saturday of that week. Victoria came out the front door first. ‘Hey,’ she’d said, blinded momentarily by the flash. When her vision cleared, she saw Nathan Ashbury.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she asked.

  ‘Come on, give us a smile, Victoria,’ Nathan said. ‘You look great.’ He was taking shots the whole time, talking to her in a way she’d heard him talk to people who didn’t want their photograph taken, coaxing.

  Victoria was wearing track pants and one of Ben’s sweatshirts, no makeup. She hadn’t even combed her hair. It was somehow worse that he was someone she knew.

  ‘I’m sorry, Nathan, but this is private property,’ she said.

  ‘I’m not on your property,’ he replied. ‘Ben!’ he called out.

  Victoria turned and saw Ben waving and smiling.

  ‘Hello there,’ Ben said. ‘How about a quick picture and you leave us alone to run?’

  ‘Great,’ Nathan said. ‘Thanks, man.’

  The shot they used, page five, wasn’t the smiling picture Victoria found herself acquiescing to. It was one of the first ones. BEN WINTER’S TRYST was the headline, Ben handsome, his beard one of those fetching shadows over his cheeks and chin, Victoria in front of him like a rabbit caught in headlights. Ben couldn’t see how unreasonable it was.

  Fear. She felt a moment of fear then. She looked through the train window to the blackness. It passed quickly. The photographers frightened her. She knew them, or knew what they did. But when their lenses were trained on her, it was entirely different.

  Was that it?

  ‘It will only be like this until we take over the story,’ she remembered Ben saying last night, his eyes tired in the dim light. That was his solution, to take over the story. He thought he could manage everything. He thought his money could manage everything. And perhaps he was right. What would Victoria know?

  Ben operated in a world where beauty, or some hard-to-define quality that was related to beauty, was what made the difference between success and failure. ‘Harrison Ford,’ he’d said to her. ‘Harrison Ford was a carpenter. He’s everyman. A lot of guys look like Harrison. Brown hair, eyes a colour you can’t remember later, bit angry round the mouth. But not one in a million can close their mouth and raise an eyebrow and look so afraid and so competent all at once. That’s the guy. He’s just the guy.

  ‘You have no flaws,’ Ben said the first night they slept together.

  ‘That’s a good thing, right?’ she said, wondering where he was going.

  ‘Yes and no. Think of the most beautiful woman in the world to you.’

  ‘Kate Winslet, this month.’

  ‘See, she has flaws.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Her cheekbones are not what you want with those lips. It combines as the gift.’

  ‘The gift.’

  ‘Our looks are a gift, just like anything else.’

  ‘Well, if it’s a choice, I’d rather brains than looks,’ she said, narrowing her eyes at him. Was he stupid? she was thinking. Talk about gifts. God, he was gorgeous. Black hair going silver at the sides—it wasn’t dyed, and she’d liked that. Big dark eyes that looked straight at her. He had a tan, but a lazy one, as if he never really had to work at it. It just happened in between takes.

  What was he doing with a woman like her? she wondered.

  She’d met many people like Ben before as part of the job: presidents, film actors, musicians. Someone else was always managing the environment for them, picking up the tab, keeping fans at bay, telling them names and reasons for meetings. Researching their interview, she read that Ben had two personal assistants with him at all times while he worked. They did shifts, a team of six young people he’d selected, four of them African American. ‘I get bright kids and give them a chance in the industry. I have a pretty high turnover, but the few who stick it out a year generally get something out of it.’ It had been written up in the liberal
press as a form of slavery, the rich white guy employing poor black guys to carry his bags. ‘I don’t care,’ he said. ‘They don’t just carry my bags. My contract with them stipulates that they have to attend acting school, and I pay for that. One of them is about to open on Broadway. Another is doing set design at NYU. It’s not an empty gesture, and it’s certainly not slavery.’

  He wasn’t stupid, she decided … and yet those films. ‘You don’t like superheroes?’ he asked when she made a joke early in their relationship.

  ‘I’ve never given them much thought,’ she said.

  ‘Fair point. What do you give thought to?’

  She found herself uncomfortable, accustomed to being the one asking the questions. ‘I don’t know. Books.’

  ‘You say that in a way,’ he said, smiling.

  ‘What way?’

  ‘Suggesting films are somehow less.’

  ‘I love the cinema.’

  ‘Just not the cinema I love.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ she said. ‘What’s the point of superheroes?’

  ‘It’s the only thing,’ he said. ‘Good can triumph over evil. Is there anything else that matters in this world? The only stories that matter are the ones that dabble in that.’

  He had a way of reducing arguments and she’d liked that at first. It seemed dependable.

  Ben had grown up in a trailer park outside Sebastopol in California, he told her on their first date. His father had left his mother when he was four and his mother decided she wouldn’t work fulltime and leave him without a parent to care for him. So they lived in a trailer, surviving on what work she could do while he was at school.

  He never wanted for anything, he said. ‘Mom was everything. She’s an amazing woman.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me all this for the story?’ Victoria asked.

  ‘Because it’s not the story,’ he said.

  ‘But it’s so great. You came from nothing. It’s the American dream.’

  ‘Okay, for a start, I didn’t come from nothing.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, realising how insensitive she’d been.

  Ben told Victoria that if his teachers were ever mean to him, his mother would go to see them and explain what they needed to do differently. If they didn’t, she kept him home and then shifted school. He changed schools four times because teachers weren’t doing him any good.

  ‘And then I bombed out of school pretty badly,’ he said. ‘I felt terrible. I knew what Mom had given up for me. She didn’t have much of a life and here I was, blowing mine.’

  And then at an acting school she’d paid for, he’d been picked for a part and then another and another until he won the Zombie World role.

  The photographers hadn’t really left them alone since Ben had been back. If Victoria accompanied him to a function, which she started doing at his insistence now that she’d been named in the press, they were photographed. Victoria didn’t feel comfortable playing the role, but it wasn’t these planned situations that frightened her; it was the unplanned ones. They ran a picture of the two of them in jeans and t-shirts one weekend and called them grungy zombies—Victoria hadn’t even seen the photographer. They took another picture of her leaving the flat for work—again, she didn’t see the photographer—and questioned whether she was putting on weight. The picture was cropped to emphasise her belly.

  It was unsustainable. She knew it was unsustainable. ‘I think if we led from the front foot, released a few pictures of us together, announced the engagement, it would be easier,’ Ben had said. ‘Otherwise, we’ll have to tell them afterwards that we got married and it looks like we have something to hide.’

  ‘Why do we have to tell them?’

  ‘They’re outside the door because they think it’s a story, you and me. If we tell them the story, we control it.’

  He sounded like his publicist, like any number of publicists Victoria had listened to. ‘That’s PR speak,’ she said.

  ‘It’s also true,’ he said. ‘If you would just let me look after you like I said, this wouldn’t have happened.’

  He meant quit her job and move to a secure house. That’s what looking after her would mean. A secure house in London, a secure house in New York, a secure house in Los Angeles. That’s all he talked about now. She wouldn’t work anymore. He’d gone from ‘you need bodyguards’ to ‘you need to stop working and stay home’. But Victoria didn’t want that. She didn’t want to live in a secure house. She wanted to keep working at the magazine and not have her picture in the paper. She wanted, badly wanted, her independence.

  ‘That’s not an option,’ Ben said calmly. Had he told her to shut her mouth? She had a memory of this but surely not. It was all hazy.

  She wanted to go back to how things were before the photographers found them. Maybe she even wanted to go back to a time before she met Ben. She couldn’t believe she was thinking this way. But it was different, she thought. She found herself afraid, inexplicably afraid because she was a journalist and should know better than to fear them.

  Those photographers who wondered if Victoria was putting on weight? They were wrong. She wasn’t putting on weight. She was pregnant, eleven weeks. She’d done three home pregnancy tests, three different brands, in the last week, and each time she sat on the toilet in the white bathroom at home and stared at two pink lines like train tracks to a new future. She hadn’t told Claire. She hadn’t told Ben. She could barely tell herself.

  New York three months ago. She’d been careless. He’d said it doesn’t matter. We’re getting married anyway. She’d been swept along.

  A child, like Jordan, Max; a child that would grow inside her, that would fuse her and Ben together forever.

  She should have telephoned him. She knew she should have. But she hadn’t.

  Victoria looked out the window to the farms giving way to the outer settlements of Paris, green spaces punctuated by giant houses in clumps, the middleclass spread, the remaining trees green against a pale sky. She hadn’t even noticed the tunnel.

  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 red-brick 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 sulphur-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-grey 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 but she did say he was her favourite 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 towards 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.