Twenty-three
SYDNEY, 1920
The next morning, Helen and I walked from Government House to the barge that would take us to H.M.S. Renown. Our bags and the boxes from the office in Sydney had been taken on by staff.
I had read in the paper that morning that there had been five thousand people lining the street the day before, completely unexpectedly. There was no mention of the car stopping, and yet I knew we had been moments from real danger. It wasn’t a joyful crowd, despite what the newspaper report said. It was a mob, and while they adored him, they might just as easily have torn him limb from limb.
Even if you were bitter and upset after the war, even if, like Daddy, you didn’t care for the monarchy, I feel certain you would still be taken in by the spectacle of the two gunships, H.M.S. Renown and H.M.S. Repulse, at the ready. On the Renown, the sailors were lined up in their shiny black shoes and white caps, all perfectly turned out and standing at attention. Behind the men, standing next to a large ship gun, were the officers in their suits and hats, also standing to attention. On the Repulse, the scene was similar.
“I’m guessing that, given all this fuss, H.R.H. is on his way to ship,” Helen said. “We better make ourselves scarce or we’ll get caught in the pomp and be unable to escape.”
Helen had told me earlier that there was a to-do about the prince’s spider letters. “I heard the tail end of something Rupert was saying to Ned. I don’t know quite what’s happened, but we’ll just lie low and hope for the best.”
We went down to the staff offices on the lower deck. Helen had told me that Mr. Waters and I were in one office, and we went there first. It was spacious and simply furnished, desks along one wall and along the opposite wall a bench seat with cushions in blue. On the floor was a woven mat and a low table. At the far end of the room were two armchairs, leather, with a blue throw rug over the back of one of them.
“That’s you,” Helen said, pointing to the desk at one end. I had my own desk, and it was already set up with a typewriter, inkwell, and paper. I felt a swell of pride.
Helen and Colonel Grigg were in an adjoining office, I soon learned. I was glad Helen would be nearby.
We could hear the band playing above us, so we knew the prince had boarded. Soon I felt the ship’s engines beneath us.
“That was fast!” Helen said. “I imagine he’s in a mood.” We rushed up onto the main deck and saw crowds up the hill and around the point, waving, throwing streamers.
We left Sydney and it was grand to be on the harbor and watch the boats that came out to see the prince away. There were two navy ships to escort us through the heads, as well as private boats from which people cheered and blew their horns. The sky was cloudless once again. I made a mental note of everything to include in my notebook that night.
I was surprised the farewell hadn’t lasted longer. “He just wants to be away,” Mr. Waters said when I found him on the main deck. “Someone’s brought the mail from the house, Maddie,” he added. “More letters.” He was shaking his head. “And I need to get you to draft some other things for me today, if possible.”
“That’s fine, Mr. Waters,” I said. “I’m ready.” I smiled my most confident smile.
“Also, I need to talk to you about something.” He held his finger up in the air as if weighing up what to say, but he said nothing.
“Rupert,” Helen said then, “Mr. Murdoch telephoned me at the house this morning. I can’t find Ned and there’s a story about the dancing last night, a different story from the other one, and it would be lovely for David to speak to Mr. Murdoch, I think. I can ask Godfrey, if you want.”
I had spent the final night in Sydney in Balmain with my family. Daddy was resigned to my going now, and Bea thought it was a brilliant opportunity. Mummy was over the moon. It was only the little boys who cried and said they’d miss me. I assured them I’d be back before they knew it.
“Miss Little again?” Mr. Waters said.
Helen nodded.
“No,” Mr. Waters said. “Godfrey already said no. The story isn’t a nice one, in case you haven’t heard it. He and the admiral are of the view it’s better to let Mr. Murdoch be Mr. Murdoch and give him no access.”
“Can I talk to him then?” Helen said.
“Not today, Helen. There’s more from the palace regards F.D.W., and it’s going to cause a ruckus.”
On the prince’s instruction, we docked at Jervis Bay to wait for the day’s mail. Our escort left us there. Helen said we needed to hope for a spider seal and there were three. “Relief!” she said. “I’m sure these will make H.R.H. very, very happy. Hopefully, we’ll have an uneventful trip.”
I’d never been on a ship before and while I found it all very exciting, I knew I must focus on my job and do the very best I could. I began to work my way through the new letters that had arrived as well as finish off the ones I hadn’t got done in Sydney over the preceding days. For the prince, six days at sea would mean a break from official functions and meeting people, but for the staff, it was a time to catch up on the work that underpinned the tour. I already knew from Mr. Waters that the prince himself read every single letter we wrote for him, and changed them too. There were times he told Mr. Waters to send a check to this person or that, to make sure this one got a handwritten letter that he penned himself. It meant I often had to retype the letters I’d already written. I couldn’t have been more happy that he took so much interest in what we did.
Mr. Waters came down after lunch on the first day. He put his briefcase on his own desk before coming over to me. “All right, Maddie. The time has come to explain one or two things.” He had an envelope in his hand. “H.R.H. has a special friend back in England.”
“The spider letters.”
“Ah, so you know.”
“I know the spider letters must go straight to the prince and I am not to open them or say anything about them to anyone.”
“Quite,” he said.
“Helen said they’re from the prince’s mistress.”
“Helen should hold her tongue. The prince has a dear friend, Mrs. Freda Dudley Ward, who is married with two children, so she’s hardly likely to be a mistress to anyone. It’s that kind of talk that makes my blood boil. I will speak to Helen.”
“She didn’t actually say that,” I said. “She hinted. I don’t want to get Helen into trouble, Mr. Waters. But the prince writes a lot of letters to F.D.W. I’m very glad he’s not . . . doing the wrong thing.”
“Yes, he does write a lot of letters,” Mr. Waters said. “She is a dear friend, as I’ve said. But now the Queen has written to H.R.H. and suggested that his friendship with Mrs. Dudley Ward is . . . that as people are talking—people like Miss Burns, who should know better—they should perhaps not be friends anymore.”
“And that’s made the prince unhappy?”
“Yes, along with other things. The King is very keen for H.R.H. to travel to India soon after he arrives home and some of us, certainly Sir Godfrey and I, think it’s premature, that H.R.H. needs some time off between this tour and another. But it gets complicated because now, I believe, Mrs. Dudley Ward has written and she has taken the Queen’s view too with respect to her friendship with Prince Edward. She’s more or less cut him off as far as I can glean.
“H.R.H. is already under enormous pressure, as you are well aware.” Mr. Waters looked as if his head were being squeezed gently in a vise that was getting tighter by the minute. “I think Mrs. Dudley Ward has been encouraged to agree with the Queen on this issue, that Prince Edward’s brother Prince Albert has been involved in some way I don’t yet understand, and now Mrs. Dudley Ward wants to end her friendship with Prince Edward.
“Prince Albert also had a friend, an Australian as it happens, Sheila Chisholm, who is a friend of Mollee Little, the Sydney girl that the prince has been so pleased to see. Prince Albert ended that friendship and has been made Duke of York for doing so.”
“They made him Duke of York for ending a friendship?”
Mr. Waters shrugged. “They are not free to live their lives as ordinary folk are.
“And now the prince, Prince Edward, is worried about all the correspondence back to England in relation to the tour,” he went on. “Admiral Halsey has written to the King, and Colonel Grigg has written to Mr. George. So poor H.R.H. has all of England worried about him. And he feels, I think . . .”
“Ganged up on?” I suggested.
“Just so, and we all need to be aware of that and do what we can to help.”
“I will write the best letters yet, Mr. Waters.”
“Oh, Maddie, that’s exactly the kind of care I am talking about. I will let H.R.H. know. I am sure it will come as comfort to him.”
“Mr. Waters, can I ask you a personal question?”
“I don’t know. I don’t much like your personal questions.” He was still smiling though. “What would the question be?”
“Helen. You seem to like Helen very much, and she seems to like you, and I don’t understand why you don’t just . . .”
“Don’t just . . . ?”
“Tell each other!”
He looked at me. “That is not just a personal question. It’s highly personal.” He was blushing, I realized. “But it has a very simple answer. Because you are wrong, as I’ve explained before. All right?”
“I’m absolutely not, Mr. Waters. I’ve seen Helen’s face when you are stern with her. I told you I have a finely tuned sense for these things.”
He gave me a look.
“Just listen to me!” I implored. “Helen loves you, Mr. Waters, I’m sure she does. You couldn’t be as nice a person as Helen is, and yet as mean to someone as she is to you, if you didn’t love them.”
He looked hopelessly confused then.
“It’s in all the novels,” I explained, uselessly, as his confusion only increased. “I can guarantee it . . . I’m fairly certain she loves you.”
He looked more upset than confused then and I wished I hadn’t said anything.
“No, Maddie, she does not love me,” he said, “unless she tells you more about her feelings for me than she tells me, and that is unlikely. I am not without a sense of these things either.”
“But how can you be sure?” I asked.
He sighed heavily. “Because when Helen started on the tour, I asked her to marry me and she refused, so on this occasion your finely tuned sense of these things has failed you.”
He looked as if saying those words had shocked even him.
“Oh, Mr. Waters, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry. I don’t know why it is that she would refuse you, and I know it’s none of my business, but it seems to me that she thinks you don’t care for her, not the other way around.”
He smiled sadly. “Well, she has refused me four times now, and I have accepted the umpire’s decision, so to speak. I thought if she came on the tour, I might . . . Anyway.” He looked up toward the window. “You can lead a horse to water . . .”
“Yes, sir, you can,” I said. “And mostly, it will drink.”
“No more personal questions, Maddie.” He was looking annoyed now.
“Of course not, Mr. Waters.”
I felt terrible, vowed never to bother him about the matter again and also to stop meddling in other people’s affairs. I would focus on the job at hand, to write the very best letters for Mr. Waters and the prince.
An hour later, Mr. Waters came back to the office and asked could he trouble me for some assistance.
“Of course.”
He looked around, closed the door between our office and the press office. “I’ve been thinking about our discussion earlier.”
“Yes, sir?” I said when he paused.
“I wondered if you could tell me what it is that makes you think Helen might have feelings for me. I’m sure you’re wrong, of course, but what is it exactly that you know?”
“Well, sir, she gets quiet whenever I ask about you, and looks sad, and when I asked she told me about meeting you in France, and said something happened, but I don’t know what it was. She did say you were in love with one another.”
“I see,” he said. “She told you this?”
“Yes, she did,” I said. “She did, Mr. Waters.”
He nodded and I saw a flicker of hope in his eyes. “I’d prefer if you didn’t tell her I was asking, Maddie,” he said then. “It’s quite a delicate matter, as it happens.”
“Mr. Waters, mum is the word.”
What on earth had happened in France? I wondered again.
“Mr. Waters, if there’s anything else . . .”
“No, that’s more than enough, Maddie. That will be all, truly.”
I hadn’t seen the prince during that first day, although Helen said he’d been running on the main deck and playing badminton with Dickie and seemed quite happy. After dinner, he sent Dickie to call us to the lounge on the main deck for games. When Helen arrived and saw Mr. Waters, I noticed the change in her, that hard heart she always turned toward him. You fool, I wanted to say! He loves you and you love him!
The prince picked Mr. Waters, Helen, and me for his team. He was in good spirits and I wondered if in private he was upset or if the letters he’d received from F.D.W. contained good news rather than bad.
We started with a game where you name an animal and the other team has to think of an animal’s name that starts with the last letter: zebra, antelope, eagle, egret, tiger, and so on.
“They give me animals, you know,” the prince said to me.
“Who gives you animals, sir?” I said.
“The Australians. Your countrymen. I had a bear, but I gave it back because it belonged to a little girl and she was devastated when she had to give it up. I have a kangaroo called Digger somewhere on board. I also have a tortoise in a tank below.”
“What do you mean?”
“I have them all somewhere on the ship. There are two lizards as well. Rupert suggested we wait until we sail out of the harbor and throw them over. I don’t think I could do that.”
“You mustn’t,” I said. “It would be cruel to the animals.”
He laughed. “And there you have the difference between us,” he said. “Isn’t that right, Waters?”
“Sir?” Mr. Waters said.
“I am kind to helpless creatures, and you are not.”
“Exactly so,” Mr. Waters said. He was smiling.
“What sort of bear was it?” I said.
“A koala,” the prince said.
We played charades then. Mr. Waters surprised me for he was immensely funny. He acted out War and Peace. His long slim frame was made for movement, I saw. It wasn’t something you’d pick about him straightaway. He did war marching like a soldier, rhymes with saw, the sawing motion, and then peace as piece of a pie. It was quite clever. Even Helen was smiling at him.
I noticed when he finished that he looked over at her sheepishly. What’s more, she didn’t stop smiling! I held my breath!
Perhaps they would overcome whatever it was that kept them from their true feelings.
The prince and I had the next one, and it was Jane Eyre of all things.
I hoped Helen would guess if I mimicked consumption, pretending at a sore throat and fever, but it was harder than I imagined. The prince and his cousin were in fits of laughter watching me gag and wander about the stage, looking like Quasimodo more than someone afflicted. I barked like a dog as well and that just made them laugh more.
The prince himself soon came up and told me he might try something new. He did air for Eyre, blowing out and gesturing, which Mr. Waters got straightaway and then his first word, sounds like pain, and Helen got to Jane.
“Have you read Jane Eyre, sir?” she asked him.
“Of course I haven’t. Who has time for books?”
“I do,” I said, quite forgetting that I was a servant and he was the Prince of Wales.
Mr. Waters looked a little taken aback, but the prince just laughed. “Well, I should hope so,” he said, “given that you’re supposed to be a prince when you write.”
I smiled. “I’m sorry, sir. I just forgot myself.”
“No,” Helen said. “Don’t be sorry. He should be sorry for not reading! If you read more, perhaps you could write your letters yourself.” She looked at him, her eyes hard.
I knew Helen had gone too far; I knew before I saw on the prince’s face that she had gone too far. There was a hint of mockery in her tone and he picked it up immediately. His face darkened.
Oh, why did she turn this hard heart of hers to the world? I didn’t know.
Mr. Waters said, “You can’t be expected to do all H.R.H. does and write silly letters to all those folk who want him to write to them.”
The prince looked ready to say something, but Mr. Waters kept going. “What we need to focus on is the tour and what it’s about, and H.R.H. is the only one of us who’s doing that properly.”
“Well said,” Dickie chimed in. “Come on, David, let’s get ourselves something to drink.”
The look on the prince’s face was hard to read now. He didn’t look angry, as I would have expected. If anything, he looked sad. Dickie stood and they walked off together. If I hadn’t known he was the prince, I’d have said he was about to cry.
“I’m so sorry,” Helen said to Mr. Waters after the prince and his cousin had gone. “I just didn’t think.”
“Well, you need to start thinking,” Mr. Waters said, getting up to follow the prince and his cousin. “Because I have enough on my plate without you upsetting him like that. You know what’s happened with Freda.” He walked away.
I found Helen on the main deck in one of the chairs, her legs curled up beneath her, looking at the moon reflected on the sea.
She had been crying, I was sure.
“I don’t think Mr. Waters meant to be harsh,” I said.
“Of course he didn’t,” she said. “It wouldn’t even enter his head that it would bother me. But we can’t possibly hurt David’s feelings because that would be the end of the world.”
“The prince did look upset at what you said.”
“Yes, he did.” She sighed.
“And maybe it was a bit mean,” I said.
“He’s a prince who doesn’t read books. I don’t think it’s necessarily poor form to point that out.”
“He did seem more upset than it warranted. You only really told him he should read, and let’s face it, he probably should if he’s going to be King.”
She smiled weakly. “Exactly. I think he thinks I find him inferior, and perhaps I do. He knows he’s not Rupert. He’s not Rupert’s bootstrap. That’s what really rankles him probably.”
“But he’s so marvelous with the soldiers, with everyone.”
“Yes, but it’s only half of the sky that is the Prince of Wales,” Helen said.
She sobbed then and it was such a heartfelt sob.
“Maddie, it’s no use.”
“What’s no use?”
“Rupert and me. It’s too hard for us.”
“But he loves you, Helen. I know he does, and you love him.”
“Well, maybe he does, and maybe I do, but it won’t be enough.”
“Because of the prince?”
“Yes, that, and what happened.”
“What did happen? He says he asked you to marry him and you refused.”
“He told you that?”
I nodded.
She sighed heavily. “Could we just sit here together and watch the night?”
I nodded again, not daring to break her reverie, caring deeply for my friend and also hoping she might tell me more.
If I’d wanted to help Mr. Waters and Helen, I’d have done well to study Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre a bit more thoroughly, for love is never so simple as it is in penny romances.
Helen didn’t tell me the truth that night. She didn’t tell me until much later, and by then it was too late to help them, too late to help any of us.