The True Story of Maddie Bright

by Mary-Rose MacColl

  ‘It is, Victoria. It is.’

  FORTY-SEVEN

  IT WAS THE NEXT DAY NOW. VICTORIA HAD HARDLY SLEPT after she’d hung up from Claire. She’d been to talk to Maddie again early in the morning. They sat where they’d sat the day before, in the chairs out on the front veranda.

  ‘I’m in trouble,’ Victoria had said.

  Maddie looked at her. ‘What sort of trouble?’

  ‘I’m engaged, and he … he isn’t right.’ She let out a sharp sob, held her breath to stop from crying. ‘He hit me,’ she whispered.

  ‘Oh, my dear girl,’ Maddie said, taking her hand. Maddie’s was cold. Victoria grabbed it with her other hand and held on.

  ‘Oh,’ Maddie said again with such love.

  Victoria started crying in earnest now. Maddie pulled her into an embrace and said, ‘There, there.’

  Victoria sat down on the floor at her grandmother’s feet and cried then as she hadn’t when she was a little girl, when her mother was gone. She cried and it felt like she would never stop. She said this, her nose and eyes running, the tissue Maddie handed her of no use to stem the tide.

  ‘Well, that’s possible but unlikely,’ Maddie said. ‘In my experience, we cry for as long as we need to, and not a moment longer.’ She kept her hand on Victoria’s back.

  Maddie didn’t ask questions and that was a relief. When Victoria had cried herself out, finally, she blew her nose on Maddie’s handkerchief and wiped her eyes.

  ‘Better?’ Maddie said.

  Victoria nodded.

  ‘You’ll be leaving him,’ Maddie said, as a statement not a question.

  ‘I know. There’s a baby.’

  ‘I see,’ she said. ‘How lovely.’

  It was later that same day and Andrew Shaw had collected her from Maddie’s and taken her out to a wildlife park. She’d said she’d like to see a platypus, but now she had a koala in her arms. It really was dear, with a sweet stupid face and chubby little legs, the softest fur, although it smelled musty, like moss after rain. It didn’t look at her. It stared front and centre, like a teddy bear preparing for a photo shoot.

  As they were taking the photograph, it pooped in her hand. She didn’t know what to do.

  ‘Oh dear,’ Andy said afterwards, brushing the poop to the ground. ‘That’s not very respectful of an international visitor.’

  Earlier they’d seen the platypus in a tank. It was much smaller than she thought it would be.

  ‘If you were here another week, I’d drive you up to O’Reilly’s,’ Andy said. ‘There’s a creek on the way where you usually see them.’

  ‘They’re the strangest animals,’ she said.

  ‘The platypus?’

  ‘All of them.’

  ‘That’s why I like Lone Pine,’ he said. ‘They’re making the animals available for people to see.’

  ‘Maddie told me they gave the prince animals on his tour,’ she said. ‘A kangaroo they took on the ship with them and a koala, but it belonged to a little girl who was devastated to lose it so he gave it back. A lizard. They returned them all before they went home to England. Probably a good thing.’

  ‘I came here with Maddie a lot when the kids were small,’ he said. ‘She never told me that.’

  They sat on the riverbank and ate the picnic he’d brought: egg sandwiches and tea in a flask.

  ‘Maddie’s better,’ he said. ‘What I mean is, she’s more settled than she was.’ There were tears in his eyes. ‘She might not live much longer but she’ll know she has nothing to be forgiven for.’ He wiped his eyes on his sleeve. ‘She’s very religious. I think she thought she might be going to hell. You were kind about all this.’

  ‘Kind?’ Victoria said. ‘It wasn’t her fault.’

  ‘No, but she thought it was.’

  ‘I don’t know if my father will come and see her.’

  ‘I don’t think it matters. You did.’ He looked at her. ‘Is it hard, knowing? Would you rather not know?’

  ‘Do you care?’

  ‘I do,’ he said. ‘I thought about it before we did this. I wondered, would I want to know? I decided I would.’

  It had been Andy’s idea to contact Victoria and not Michael. It was easier to ask for a journalist and he figured Victoria, being one generation removed, might find it easier. Poor Finian Inglis would be disappointed there wasn’t another book, Victoria had thought, although she wasn’t entirely sure there wasn’t a book. There was a manuscript on Maddie’s desk and Victoria wondered if it told the story after all. She had been itching to have a closer look.

  ‘It’s the deception that most rankles,’ Victoria said. ‘I was close to my grandmother growing up, and yet she never told me.’ ‘I guess once she’d told Maddie, she felt she’d done what she should. And they were different times. They were scared of the royal family.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Not now though. They’d never do that now.’

  She looked at him. ‘No, although you never know. I have a friend who thinks they’re worse than the mafia.’

  He laughed. ‘Is that your fiancé?’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘I notice you’re not wearing a ring,’ he said.

  She hadn’t worn her engagement ring since arriving.

  She looked at her hand. ‘I’m working it out,’ she said finally.

  He nodded. ‘Let me know when you have.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I might want to know.’

  She laughed. ‘You never remarried?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I tried a couple of dates when the kids were a bit older, but none of them … Women don’t generally want two kids from the get-go.’

  ‘Some might,’ Victoria said.

  ‘Well, it’s not The Brady Bunch out there.’

  ‘My father might not want to meet you,’ Victoria had said to Maddie that morning.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Will that be all right?’

  ‘It will have to be.’

  ‘How do you stay happy, given everything that happened?’

  ‘Ah, well, I don’t know much about happiness. The children saved me, first the children I taught at Ithaca and then Frank and Sally. It’s impossible to be anything but in the moment when you have forty youngsters to contend with.

  ‘What I know is I have these gifts. First, Ed, then Andy and Frank and Sally, and now you. You’ve arrived and now I know I can meet my maker and I won’t have to account for killing a child. You’re a beautiful girl and Diana is at peace. And there’s a baby!’

  From Autumn Leaves by M.A. Bright:

  Addendum

  London, 1921

  The knock was so soft on the front door she might have missed it. But then the wailing started up and she didn’t miss that.

  She went along the narrow hallway past the study, opened the door.

  It was him.

  In his arms, he carried a child. The child was the one wailing.

  ‘Where have you been?’ she said, taking the child from him without thinking.

  ‘Not with you,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry. I’ve left David’s service for good.’

  ‘No, I mean, where did you get a baby?’ She lifted the child onto her shoulder and began to rub its back. Wind? Did it have wind? It settled there at any rate.

  She remembered the women of Asnières, their soldier husbands gone back to war, leaving them with children. She’d done what she could to help, carrying babies around the little schoolroom while she taught to give the mothers a break, her own heart on her sleeve.

  ‘How did you find me?’ she said now.

  ‘I’m the government.’ But he was smiling as he said it.

  Something had changed in him, she thought, and then no, she decided. Nothing would change in him. Her heart hardened momentarily. But then he took his hat off, his hair falling straight into his eyes. She felt a sudden pull of tenderness.

  ‘Whose baby is it?’

  ‘Ours,’ he said, pushing his hair back
.

  ‘Ours?’

  ‘We can’t ever say anything different.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Will you marry me?’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I don’t have a ring yet.’

  ‘I still don’t understand.’

  ‘I love you. I’ve resigned.’

  ‘What about India?’

  ‘Some other fool will go to India.’

  ‘Won’t David need you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’ve resigned?’

  He took from his coat pocket a piece of paper. He unfolded it, a page from The Times. He pointed to a story. ‘This.’

  She took it in her right hand, leaned back so that the baby didn’t fall forward. She read. ‘A baby died?’

  He shook his head, gestured to the child. His eyes were filling with tears.

  ‘This is the baby? But why?’

  He put his finger over his lips. ‘We can never tell.’

  ‘All right,’ she said.

  ‘Maddie,’ he said. His voice choked as he said it.

  ‘And David?’

  He nodded tightly. ‘Godfrey knew.’

  ‘I’ll kill David. How could he?’

  He shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘We’ll do what we can do. Maddie’s all right. She’s on her way home. I’ve seen she’s looked after.’

  ‘Does David know?’

  ‘About the child?’ He nodded.

  ‘What were they going to do?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  The baby, who had fallen into a deep sleep on her shoulder, stirred now. ‘They wouldn’t.’

  He nodded, almost imperceptibly. ‘They think they did.’ He gestured towards the newspaper.

  ‘Godfrey?’

  ‘No, the Queen’s men.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘All right,’ she said.

  ‘All right, we won’t tell, or all right, you’ll marry me?’

  ‘Both?’

  He grinned. ‘I’m about the happiest man on earth.’

  She smiled. ‘Our child?’

  He nodded.

  ‘All right.’

  From Winter Skies:

  Epilogue

  Brisbane, 1997

  She saw him like new as he walked up the air bridge to where people waited for loved ones. He looked lost, reminding her of that other morning, when her mother was gone, and for a moment it felt as if her mother had died all over again that very day and he was returned to that place of grief.

  He came slowly, thoughtfully. He was wearing his travel clothes: neat dark grey slacks, white shirt, navy coat. His curly hair, gone grey, was clipped short and he wore his reading glasses.

  He carried a copy of Autumn Leaves.

  He looked like his mother, Victoria thought, like Maddie. The spitting image of her in the face.

  ‘Daddy,’ she said. ‘I’m so glad you’ve come.’

  Andy had waited at the house with Maddie. She was nervous, she said. It will be fine, Victoria had told her. I know it will be.

  But Victoria didn’t know. She knew how difficult her father could be, how much this mattered.

  Maddie stood. He was in the doorway, a foot taller than his mother.

  Neither spoke.

  They moved towards one another.

  On Writing

  H.R.H. Edward Prince of Wales visited Australia in 1920 and had a train crash. While I researched what has been written about Edward, all the characters in The True Story of Maddie Bright are fictional. Fidelity to history is not the job of the novelist. We tell plausible whoppers, as Margaret Atwood has said, and that’s what I have done. True story!

  This is my sixth plausible whopper and seventh book with Allen & Unwin and if it were my last, I would mark the moment. Before I was a novelist and after I was (briefly) a cadet journalist, I worked for mathematician Dennis Gibson who was a university vice-chancellor. My job was to write his correspondence and speeches. I learned to be the voice of someone else, and we both loved books. Before I worked for Dennis, I worked for Brian Waters who was the registrar at the university, and I learned about duty and possibly semicolons.

  My agent Fiona Inglis took me on nearly ten years ago after she read the original manuscript for my book For a Girl, published in 2017, which tells a true story from my young life. It takes a certain kind of heart to do what Fiona did. Some people who have read no other books of mine but For a Girl, or who listened to the ABC Conversations interview about the book, wrote to me and trusted me with their own stories. I am proud to count myself among you.

  I don’t think I knew how to write a novel until about the fourth one, but my publisher at Allen & Unwin is Annette Barlow, and she and her team have maintained the same dedication and care to make my plausible whoppers more plausible for twenty years now, which would be a feat in any circumstance but is mighty given the disrupted state of their industry in these first decades of the twenty-first century.

  Like universities, you will find extraordinary people in publishing if you stop and regard them: editor Ali Lavau, who keeps a writer from her most wrongheaded impulses, earlier Catherine Milne, a notable editor now a publisher, and long ago, Sophie Cunningham, a publisher now a writer. Nada Backovic designed beautiful covers for my earlier books, and her work is honoured here by Lisa White. Aziza Kuypers, a final reader of the manuscript of this novel, managed to avert an implausible whopper almost at the finish line. Christine Farmer has run more than publicity for the book with great professionalism and kindness. And senior editor, dear Christa Munns, has made sure we all do what we’re supposed to do while wrangling 115,000 words and nearly as many changes penned across them, twice. Annette Barlow herself is gentle and generous in her spirit. She was the first reader and editor of The True Story of Maddie Bright, and I’m so grateful she is the one.

  Readers. Colleagues Belinda Ogden, Jo Fleming and Sasha Marin read the early novels in draft and Kris Olsson was a reading friend for a long time. My uncle Tony Lynch and aunt Jill Lynch have come to every one of my book launches. Wendy Brealey has read every one of my books. Sharon Cameron and her bookclub gave The True Story of Maddie Bright shape and she and Cass George are the kind of bookclub folk you wish ran the world. Some readers send me kind emails.

  It takes a village and when you are a writer they should all be certified psychotherapists. Louise Ryan and Gerard Ryan and Lib Fletcher have been there for most of my life; Suzi Jefferies, Theanne Walters and Lenore Cooper too now. Rebecca Lamoin has been an unexpected gift to my creative soul, and Andrea Fox makes me think differently. Kim Wilkins has supported many writers including me and is my sister on the road.

  The Banff Centre and Wild Flour Bakery Cafe were a mother’s arms when I needed them. Stace Callaghan is the invincible summer in the quote. Shar Edmunds has restored my faith in a good world which I find I do not want to live without. Cathy Sinclair walks up a mountain with me and doesn’t give advice, sometimes not even if I ask for it. Merlo Paddington, you know what you do.

  David Mayocchi has walked a long road beside me and it has cost him, and all the good men in my novels rely on him for lessons about how to be a person.

  As readers of For a Girl will know, I have two children, one named Otis and one I named Ruth who has another name now. I love them both and that is the antidote to despair.

  Mary-Rose MacColl December 2018