At Home with the Templetons

by Monica McInerney

  She knew she wouldn’t sleep now. Instead, she got up and made herself a cup of warm milk. Sitting outside on the step, cradling the cup, she tried to sort through her thoughts and understand why today’s events had upset her so much. Hope’s racist comments, yes. Henry Templeton’s condescending manner, yes. There was even a grain of truth in Tom’s words. Sometimes she did wish they lived in a bigger house.

  But as she sat out under the night sky, sipping slowly, listening but not bothered by the rustlings of birds and small animals in the bushland around their house, she realised they weren’t the main reasons for her reaction.

  As she’d walked around Templeton Hall, as she watched the family play their parts – not Hope, but the others – she’d become aware of a strange, unhappy feeling inside her. Jealousy. Not of the big house, the big garden or of the family’s obvious wealth. She was jealous of the Templetons themselves. They were a family. A happy family. A happy mother and a happy father and four happy children.

  The contrast between them couldn’t have been starker. There she was in her small, rented farmhouse, trying her hardest, coping as best she could on her own, still desperately missing her husband, feeling lonely and sad and worrying about Tom, about money, about the future. And there they were, the perfect rich family, carefree and adventurous, with enough time and money on their hands to arrive out of the blue from the other side of the world, hire the best and quickest of builders and architects to open a living museum, and all with such style and confidence.

  Another rush of envy overwhelmed her now. She tried to dismiss it, recalling what she’d heard people saying around her today as she and Tom moved through the house. Show ponies, she’d heard one man call them. Crazy. Mad. Eccentric.

  They were all those things, Nina agreed. But their antics had also looked like fun. Any family that felt the need or had the desire to undertake a renovation like that and spend their weekends dressing up was having fun together. And that was exactly what she missed in her own life. The fun had gone missing the moment she was told about Nick’s death.

  She tried to concentrate on that exchange with Hope. Tried to summon the anger again. But even as the other woman was speaking, Nina had sensed that all wasn’t quite right with her. Whether she’d been drinking, or had taken something else, her eyes hadn’t been quite focused, her words too bizarre, as if she too had been playing a role, like the rest of the family, but in a much darker, stranger play.

  Nina did what she often did at times like this. She went inside and rang her sister, hoping she was still awake. Her elder by just fourteen months, thirty-seven-year-old Hilary was her best friend and sounding board, sensible without being a stick-in-the-mud. After leaving school, she’d studied to be an accountant and worked for five years in a large Brisbane firm, before taking two years off to go travelling. She’d come home a changed woman, thrown in accountancy and retrained as a nurse. For the past four years she’d worked as a theatre sister in a Cairns hospital, living with her husband of three years and happily playing stepmother to his two teenage daughters from a much earlier marriage.

  Hilary was up, ready to listen, and even more importantly, seemed to understand Nina’s feelings immediately. ‘Just keep away from them. You’ve done your civic and neighbourly duty now, haven’t you? You’re not a tenant on their land, legally bound to make regular weekend visits so you can be harangued by racist upper-class ladies or offered cups of tea by a man who quite frankly sounds as though he would surpass Basil Fawlty when it comes to interesting approaches to hospitality …’

  Nina laughed, feeling her tension lift and her mood change as she agreed completely with her sister that no, she need have nothing else to do with Templeton Hall or its new inhabitants.

  ‘They’ll try and seduce you, though, you know,’ Hilary continued. ‘Lure you into their world. Promise me, Nina Donovan. Swear on the nearest Bible or trashy paperback or school newsletter. Promise you won’t be drawn into their debauched world of dress-ups and gala balls and garden fetes and cucumber sandwiches and croquet on the lawn and —’

  ‘I promise,’ Nina said, smiling again.

  Hilary’s voice softened. ‘Maybe they looked perfect from the outside, Nina, but who knows what the truth is. You look like you have the perfect life yourself sometimes, you know. A beautiful son, a successful career.’

  ‘Oh, sure.’

  ‘I mean it, you do. Forget about them, honey. Don’t visit the house again. Just try to put them and what happened today out of your mind. Promise?’

  ‘Promise.’

  It was easy not to visit the Hall again. Not quite so easy to forget about it, however, when her route into Castlemaine to drop Tom to school each day took her past the entrance to their driveway, and her route back gave her a briefly perfect view of the Hall through the trees, but she made herself look away each time. It was even harder to insulate herself from news about the Templetons themselves. It quickly became obvious that anything the family did was prime gossip in the area. Over the next months, Nina heard countless anecdotes. There was the story of Henry Templeton marching into a council meeting to declare war on the mayor, insisting that a recent turning down of a planning permission application relating to Templeton Hall was vexatious and ill-informed. A lawyer from Melbourne had followed him in, apparently, to state the case in far more civilised tones and language. A stormy exchange had taken place, Henry at the centre, ‘carrying on as if he was in the House of Lords’, one councillor described it. The application was passed a week later. Bribery, people in town whispered. Money talks.

  The local tourist association was equally disgusted several months later by the arrival of a letter from Henry Templeton, rejecting their ‘so kind invitation’ to join the association. (The head of the association said she was surprised it wasn’t signed Esquire.) ‘We prefer to forge our own path but thank you for your valuable efforts to promote our beautiful area.’

  ‘The arrogance of him,’ one of the committee members said to Nina when they met in the town’s main street one afternoon. ‘Who does he think he is? He needs us.’

  But it seemed he didn’t. Henry Templeton and his costume-wearing, English-accented wife, daughters, son and sister-in-law seemed able to attract all the publicity they could possibly need. There were regular articles in the local newspaper. Nina turned on the TV one night to see Henry beaming at the camera, as he led a crew from a current affairs program through Templeton Hall. ‘It’s like stepping back in time to a more gracious era the moment you enter this wonderful living museum,’ the voiceover explained.

  Two months later, another rush of media attention, this one sparked by the theft of a vase apparently worth thousands of dollars (thousands of pounds, originally, of course, as Henry explained in one of the many newspaper and radio interviews he gave). ‘We run Templeton Hall on a basis of trust,’ Nina heard him say. ‘This is our home and our visitors are our guests. It would be the height of rudeness to declare ourselves suspicious of their every move.’

  Nina’s parents were enthralled by the whole case. They were visiting her at the time, and in Nina’s opinion, far too intrigued by the Templetons. Nevertheless, she dropped them off at the driveway to the Hall, and also listened with more interest than she liked to admit when they returned, filled with stories. They’d been shown around by the little boy and one of the older girls, Audrey, they thought it was. Both very theatrical, they reported, and filled with facts and figures about the Hall. All very fascinating. And all very funny too.

  ‘They don’t take themselves at all seriously, do they?’ Nina’s mother declared. ‘The little boy especially. We were nearly in tears laughing at the stories he was coming up with. Standing there in old-fashioned clothes, buttons undone, chewing gum as he talked to us,’ her mother continued, laughing again at the memory of it.

  The whole house was spotless too, she said. Gleaming. How on earth did they manage it? she wanted to know. They either spent the entire week cleaning or had a tribe of maids
or servants or whatever term was appropriate in an historic house like that. Her mother wasn’t the first to ask the question. The mystery was solved when a delivery man reported seeing several Templetons in cleaning gear one weekday afternoon, scrubbing floors and washing windows. The little boy looked furious about it, he said.

  There was also plenty of discussion locally about the family’s unconventional school arrangements, particularly the home-schooling of the youngest children. Questions of legality were raised. Discussions on whether it was some sort of fundamentalist religious cult. Some people seemed quite disappointed when they heard, from reliable sources, that Eleanor Templeton had recently met with one of the local principals to organise access to the school library. It seemed she not only held a master’s degree in education herself, had not only home-schooled all her children through their primary years, but had also co-authored a well-received handbook in the UK on the benefits of home-schooling younger children.

  No matter how unorthodox their lives were, however, their business approach clearly worked. Within eighteen months of the fete, Templeton Hall had been named in the top five of the goldfields’ premier tourist attractions, second only to the nearby Sovereign Hill, the replica goldrush settlement complete with operating mines, shops and businesses.

  ‘You must be curious to go and visit the Hall again,’ one of Nina’s school-mum friends asked her once. ‘They’re your neighbours, for heaven’s sake.’

  ‘Let me guess what it’s still like. An old house, people in costume, antiques and history lessons?’

  ‘Well, yes. But it’s like living next door to Disneyland and never going to shake Mickey Mouse’s hand.’

  ‘He’d have germs. Imagine how many people’s hands he shakes every day.’

  ‘But their little boy is just a year or two younger than Tom. Wouldn’t it be handy if they could play together?’

  Nina had changed the subject then. Yes, it would be handy but it wasn’t going to happen. Introducing Tom to the Templeton boy would mean walking up that long drive again, knocking at the door and then what? Being overwhelmed by that feeling of envy and sadness again? Or being chased away by Hope? She didn’t know which would be worse.

  In the past month or two, however, the distance between their two houses had started narrowing again. From the moment Tom told her he’d met Spencer Templeton at the yabby dam that marked the halfway point between Templeton Hall and their house, Nina had felt uneasy.

  Up until then, Tom had seemed content enough to spend hours playing on his own. It had worried her when they first moved here, that the house was too isolated, that there were no neighbours’ kids for him to meet up with after school. But he’d always been independent, from the time he could walk, happy in his own company. Like his father had been. On weekends, Tom would organise a bag full of supplies for himself – a sandwich or two, a bottle of water, apples, chocolate if she had any in the house – and then set off to have what he’d tell her was ‘an adventure’.

  ‘Don’t go far,’ she’d say. ‘You won’t hurt yourself, will you?’

  ‘Not deliberately,’ he said once, smiling at her. ‘Mum, come on. Why would I do that?’

  She’d had to work hard to keep the relaxed smile on her face too, to let him head off on his own without thinking she was home fretting for every minute he was out of her sight. He was a sensible kid, she told herself. He won’t do anything stupid. The problem was, she kept imagining the things he could do. She pictured him climbing a big gum tree and not being able to get down. Building a raft in the dam and having it sink moments after launching. Losing his sense of direction and being unable to find his way home, frightened as the sky grew dark, the air grew cold …

  So far, Tom had proved her fears groundless every time. Just as she found herself growing anxious, she’d hear him whistling, or hear the sound of a stick he was carrying being banged against the fence that surrounded their small property. The whistling was what gave her the idea but it took her time to summon up the courage to ask him.

  He hadn’t laughed at her, or got upset. He’d just listened in that gentle, watchful way he had and then repeated what she’d said. ‘You want me to carry a proper whistle and blow it every now and then so you can hear I’m okay?’

  ‘I shouldn’t worry, but, Tom, I just do. Especially when you’re out there on your own.’

  ‘I know my way home. I know every bit of the land around here.’

  ‘I know you do. And I don’t want you to not go out there. It’s just I find it hard to work if I think you might be lost or upset.’

  ‘What if I’ve broken my leg in five places, am lying on an anthill being devoured by fire ants while a pack of lizards is chewing my foot, and I blow the whistle. How will you know the difference between an “I’m being attacked” call and a “Don’t worry, Mum, I’m alive and well” call?’

  ‘Can you blow the whistle twice if there are broken legs, fire ants and lizards involved?’

  He grinned then, and took the whistle she’d bought for him. It was an antique one she’d found in a second-hand shop in Castlemaine, an old-fashioned silver cylinder with a ring on top and Acme City: Made in England engraved on the front. She’d felt bad about it the next time he’d gone out, too over-protective, until the faint sound of the whistle, just once an hour or so, soothed her worries completely, and let her relax into her own work. So relaxed, in fact, that it was almost a surprise when the whistle sounded outside her window and she glanced up from her canvas to see he was almost home. He’d guessed too, laughing at her. ‘You forgot all about me, didn’t you?’

  ‘Of course not,’ she’d started to protest, before smiling back. ‘I just didn’t worry about you, that’s all. There’s a big difference.’

  She’d been in the kitchen cooking dinner the evening Tom returned home from the dam with a bag full of yabbies and a tale to tell. ‘I met this kid Spencer at the dam. He’s from England and he’d never even heard of yabbies before, so I told him they were sort of Australian crayfish, and then he ran home and got his own string and bait and —’

  ‘Spencer? Spencer Templeton, you mean? From Templeton Hall?’

  ‘You know him?’

  ‘We saw him that day at the fete, do you remember? Dressed up and showing people around.’

  ‘He was that kid?’ Tom said, as if it all made sense now. ‘He told me he’s never been to school, not even for a day. His mum teaches him at home. Can you teach me? That would be so cool.’

  ‘No, I can’t teach you and everything’s cool to you at the moment.’ Nina was surprised at her bristling reaction to Tom’s news. ‘We don’t really know him or his family, Tom. I’d rather you didn’t play with him again.’

  ‘But he’s the only other kid around here.’

  ‘You can have your friends home from school any time you like.’

  ‘But their parents have to drive them and pick them up or you have to drive me and pick me up. Spencer and I can just meet at the dam. I told him about the whistle. He’s going to get one too, so if he blows it I know he’s at the dam and I can meet him there. He said I can go and visit his house any time I like.’

  ‘No, you can’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  It was taking some getting used to, this new, older Tom who questioned everything she said to him. ‘Because I’d rather you didn’t. Because I don’t know his family.’

  ‘So get to know them.’

  ‘Please don’t talk to me like that.’

  Tom’s face turned mutinous. ‘You don’t let me do anything I want to do.’

  ‘I do, actually.’ She kept her voice calm, with difficulty. ‘You have a hundred times more freedom than I did when I was your age.’

  ‘This isn’t freedom.’ He said the last word at the top of his voice as he left the room, slamming the door behind him.

  Nina was shocked at her own anger. She wanted to ban him from meeting Spencer, tell him he wasn’t to go near the Templetons’ house again. She only ju
st managed to stop herself following him into his room and shouting back at him. Again, she was overwhelmed by a rush of feeling, of wishing Nick was here, wishing that she could ask him to talk to Tom, ask him to deal with this new version of their previously sweet-natured son.

  But if Nick was here, Tom wouldn’t have needed a friend like this Spencer. Nick would have played cricket with him, kicked a football, taken him yabbying. She knew that line of thinking was counter-productive and also untrue. If Nick had still been alive, she and Tom wouldn’t have even been in Victoria. They would have been living in Queensland, with her mother and father just down the road, their kids going to local schools …

  Push it down, push it away, she’d told herself that night. Give Tom the fun he wants. Don’t make a big deal of this. And she’d nearly succeeded. Since then, she’d managed to smile and try to look interested and relaxed and unaffected by Tom’s stories about his new friend Spencer. They’d only met twice more, as far as she knew, at the dam each time. They still hadn’t caught any yabbies, but they’d talked about building a raft together, using wood from one of the old Templeton Hall fences, corrugated iron left over from the new chicken coop at the Hall. They’d transport it all over in a wheelbarrow, Tom had told her. Again, Nina had to stop herself from warning Tom of all the dangers, from thinking too much herself about possible risks – rusty nails in the iron, splinters from the wood. The one thing she didn’t have to worry about was drowning, at least. The water in the dam was only about six inches high at the moment.

  The sound of the ten o’clock morning news jingle on the radio brought her back to the present. Time for work. As she put the local paper into the recycling bin, she imagined the excitement this latest Templeton antic would cause around town. And at home too.

  ‘Why haven’t you taught me to drive?’ she imagined Tom saying. ‘All the Templeton kids learnt to drive when they were babies. They all got mini-BMWs for their third birthdays. Baby-sized ones. With their names monogrammed on the doors.’

  It felt good to laugh about it. She knew Hilary would enjoy hearing about it too. She was just reaching for the phone to give her sister a quick pre-work call when it rang. She wasn’t surprised. Their link was so strong they often rang each other at the same time.