‘And decreased working hours? Sounds unfair to me, more money for less work.’
‘Can we at least have a whole weekend off now and then?’
‘We can look at the rosters, of course. Anything else?’
Audrey spoke, but was looking at her feet as she did. ‘I’m sick of that pink gown you had made for me.’
‘I am too. That colour doesn’t suit you. Fine, new costumes. For all of you. Would that make it better?’
Four nods.
‘Splendid. Now, anything else, while we are having this wonderfully full and frank discussion?’
‘I have a question,’ Charlotte said.
‘That surprises me,’ Henry said. ‘Yes, Charlotte?’
‘I’d like to know about your future plans for the Hall.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I’m wondering if you’ve given any thought to what will happen when —’
Henry started to laugh. ‘Am I hearing right? You, the oldest of my four young children, are asking me what I plan to do with this property when I leave this mortal coil?’
‘Mosquito coil? What’s he talking about?’ Spencer hissed to Audrey.
‘Mortal coil,’ Audrey whispered back. ‘He’s talking about when he dies.’
‘He’s dying?’ Gracie hissed, alarmed.
‘No, Gracie, I’m not dying,’ Henry said. ‘Not as far as I know, anyway. And not for a while yet, I hope. Charlotte, how delicate and diplomatic of you. Should I start checking my soup for rat poison? Watch out for you measuring for new carpets?’
Charlotte went a sudden shade of red. ‘I didn’t mean it like that. I get asked about it all the time at school, whether all four of us will inherit the Hall equally, even if there’s a title attached to it.’
‘From what you’ve just said, the most appropriate title for you is the Grim Reaper.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Gracie said.
Eleanor stepped in. ‘There’s plenty of time to talk about this another day.’
‘Exactly,’ Henry said. ‘Besides, I haven’t finalised my will yet. I might leave the Hall to the chickens. Or Hope.’
‘That’s not funny, Dad,’ Charlotte said, her expression stony.
‘No, it isn’t. I apologise. Believe me, Charlotte, once I get a valid premonition of my date of demise, I’ll be sure to call you all in and inform you exactly what my plans are regarding the property. Are you happy to be patient?’
Charlotte nodded, still looking unhappy.
‘Very good. Thank you. Gracie, please take that worried expression off your face, I promise you I’m not about to die. Spencer, leave your sister’s shoelaces alone. As for all your other demands regarding the running of the Hall, sorry, your other suggestions, I’ll draw up a contract. Thank you all for your time. See you at dinner tonight.’
Eleanor waited until all four children had left the room before shutting the door and turning to her husband. ‘They don’t know quite what hit them.’
Henry smiled. ‘Talk fast enough and you can stop most uprisings in my experience.’
‘So you’ll do what they ask? New rosters, new clothes, weekends off? When we can’t afford to do any of that at the moment?’
‘It’s a delicate balancing act, Eleanor. Offer plenty, deliver some, forget about most of it. Governments and tyrants the world over live life by that creed. Who am I to start anew?’
‘Perhaps we should do exactly that.’
‘Exactly what?’
‘Start anew. All of us. Put the Hall on the market, pay off all our debts, move back to England again. Have a proper, fresh start.’
‘Do you really mean that?’
She nodded.
‘Eleanor, my love, if it was possible, you know I would. But you know the limitations of the inheritance as well as I do. No selling the property for at least twenty years and even then only with legal permission. I know it’s been hard and it might get harder still, but at least we’re in it together, aren’t we? All of us, a family, having an adventure on the other side of the world, giving our children special times to remember —’
Eleanor held up her hand. ‘Please, Henry, stop there. Your audience has gone.’
‘My audience? Eleanor, what are you talking about? I’m speaking from my heart, to you, the holder of my heart.’
She shook her head, smiling now. ‘You really are a wily silver-tongued creature, Henry Templeton. Did you know that?’
‘Of course.’ He walked across the room and touched her cheek. ‘I convinced you to marry me, didn’t I?’
CHAPTER FIVE
In the farmhouse, Nina turned away from the canvas she was working on, wiped the paint off her hands and checked the time. Nearly six. Fifteen minutes before it was time to collect Tom from cricket practice. Instead of sticking to the rules of his now three-week-old grounding and bringing him straight home, she’d decided to allow tonight’s long-scheduled outing to go ahead: dinner in one of the local Italian restaurants in Castlemaine, followed by a video of his choice back home. It was a tradition they’d started in recent years, taking place two months to the day after Tom’s birthday, their own way of marking the anniversary of his father’s death, wherever they were living.
Thinking of what lay ahead, Nina felt a flutter of nerves. Would she finally manage it tonight? Finally find the words to tell Tom the truth about his father’s death? Each year that had been her plan. Each year she’d decided at the last minute that it wasn’t the right time. Would tonight be any different? There’d been so much tension between her and Tom since she’d grounded him, they were barely talking about anything at the moment.
‘Nina, you have to stop finding excuses,’ Hilary had said the previous year, when Nina rang to tell her another anniversary had gone by without her telling him the truth. ‘Otherwise he’ll find out for himself one day and it’ll cause even more heartache.’
‘How will he find out?’
‘If he ever sees Nick’s death certificate. Or if you ever let him visit his own father’s grave. You think he won’t notice the date is the same as his birthday?’
Hilary’s tone made Nina immediately defensive. ‘It won’t change anything. His father won’t come back to life just because Tom knows the date he really died.’
‘You know that’s not what we’re talking about. You can’t protect him from every hurt life throws at him, Nina. And he has to be able to trust you. The longer this goes on, the worse it will be when you do tell him the truth.’
Nina knew Hilary was right. In their many discussions, Hilary had insisted that it was perfectly understandable why Nina had first lied to Tom, and yes, just as understandable that she had found it hard to tell the truth once the lie was there.
But Hilary only knew the half of it. As far as she knew, the only lie Nina had told Tom was about the year Nick had died. If only it was that simple.
Nina had met Nick on her first day at college in Brisbane, introduced in the cafeteria by a mutual friend. She was studying graphic design and illustration. Nick was doing a business administration degree. They were acquaintances for the first year, confidantes and study partners the next, until finally, four weeks before they did their final third-year exams, they went to an all-night party together, walked home hand in hand along the dawn-lit streets to his small flat in Fortitude Valley and became lovers.
‘At last!’ all their friends had said. ‘We thought you two were never going to get it together.’ After graduation, Nina realised she didn’t want to stop seeing him every day, and was relieved and happy to learn he felt the same way.
‘I’ve loved you since the first day I saw you,’ he told her.
‘You have? Why did it take you so long to tell me?’
‘I wanted to be sure you’d improve with age,’ he’d said with a grin.
She’d hit him playfully and he’d grabbed her hand and kissed it, his face serious for once. ‘You did. You get better every single day.’
They lived togeth
er in Brisbane for a year until he was offered a management job with a big sugar company in Mackay, just an hour from her home town. He accepted it, they got engaged a month later, and were married in her hometown church eight months after that. Their plan was to rent somewhere locally while they saved up for a deposit on a house and then think about trying for a baby. Tom, it seemed, had other ideas. She’d just turned twenty-three when she found out she was pregnant. Nick was twenty-five.
It was an easy, happy nine months, no morning sickness, only some tiredness. A textbook pregnancy, her doctor called it. She went into labour just after lunch on her due date, to her surprise as much as everyone else’s. Even her mother had insisted first babies never arrive on time. Nick hadn’t hesitated about going to work that morning as normal.
When the pains started, she rang him. They decided it was probably a false alarm and she talked him into staying at work. The second time she phoned he knew from her voice that it was serious. He made it back to their house in thirty minutes, a record even by his fast-driving standards. He knew every road like the back of his hand, he always reassured her, whenever she worried about him driving home exhausted after his twelve-hour days.
He fussed over her, took charge, rang the hospital another hour away in the other direction, rang her parents, his parents, her sister, his brother, his voice a rush of excitement and happiness, letting everyone know that this first baby was going to arrive on time, and was on its way already. He’d just started calling the rest of the people on their phone list – aunts, uncles, cousins, friends – when she gently reminded him that perhaps they should think about getting her to the hospital.
He drove more slowly than she’d ever seen him do, one hand on the wheel, the other tightly holding her hand, until she told him it really would be okay if he went faster than twenty kilometres an hour. He refused to let her walk into the hospital, stopping the car outside the front door, running into reception, begging the use of a wheelchair, despite her insistence she was fine to walk.
‘We’re having a baby,’ he said to anyone they passed in the corridor. ‘My wife is having a baby.’
‘Good thing you’re in a maternity hospital, then,’ an amused nurse replied.
Nina had just settled into her room and was lying back on her bed breathing deeply as she’d been taught, Nick doing the breathing alongside her a little too enthusiastically, when she remembered in all the fuss they’d left her suitcase at home. Nick checked with the doctor. Was there time for him to go back and get it?
Time to go there and back two or three times, the doctor assured them. ‘Your baby’s just letting us know he or she’s on the way. We’ve a long wait yet.’
‘I’ll be back as soon as I can,’ Nick said, kissing her forehead. ‘I love you.’ They were his last words to her.
She was in full labour when she was told the news. She’d been scared by the sudden arrival and intensity of the pain, she needed Nick there, now, beside her, now. She couldn’t understand where he was. She called his name, shouted it, began screaming it, asking the nurses to get him, shouting at her obstetrician, her mother, her father, anyone, begging them to find him. It was her mother who eventually came into the labour ward, her face ashen, her hands clenched. It was her hands Nina noticed, even through her own pain. Her mother never clenched her hands like that.
Later, she learnt there had been passionate arguments outside the delivery room about whether to tell her or not, and when to tell her. She reacted badly when she heard that. ‘You were just going to pretend Nick wasn’t dead? That he’d gone out for a coffee while his child was being born? Taken a wrong turn and got lost?’ She became hysterical, shouting at the doctor, at her parents, at her sister, at anyone who came into her room who wasn’t Nick.
Three hours later, Tom was born, a strong, healthy baby. A beautiful baby. She learnt from Hilary much later that there was fear in the family she would reject Tom. That her shock about Nick’s death would overwhelm any love she might feel for her son. It didn’t happen like that. Her grief for Nick was the worst pain she’d ever felt – sharp, raw, frightening – yet her love for her baby son was as immediate and overwhelming. He was the only thing that was good in her life. He was now, suddenly, shockingly, the person she loved most in the world.
She managed three days in hospital before she discharged herself, against everyone’s advice. ‘I know what I need to do,’ she said. It was a phrase she’d repeat many times over the next few weeks, the next few years, as too many people tried to tell her how to feel, what to do, how she should be behaving.
If it had been hard in the hospital, it was worse outside. Every moment of every day she missed Nick so much it was a physical pain. Each day she was confronted with the horrible, constant reality of his absence. She walked the streets they’d walked together, pushed the pram they’d chosen together, drove the roads they’d travelled together. After Tom went to sleep each night, she sat alone in their living room, slept alone in their bed. If she went to visit her mother and father, she had to drive through the intersection where Nick was killed.
Everyone in the town knew who she was and what had happened. She couldn’t walk into the post office or the supermarket or the bakery without noticing conversations stop, seeing people rearrange the expressions on their faces or hearing murmurs and comments even before she’d walked outside again. ‘The poor things. What a tragedy.’ The closer it got to Tom’s first birthday and Nick’s first anniversary, the more she felt it.
Two weeks before Tom turned one she knew she had to leave. She ended the lease on the house they had rented, gave their furniture to the local charity shop and said her goodbyes. She ignored her parents’ pleas, Hilary’s phone calls, Nick’s parents’ advice. She had to. This wasn’t about them. They weren’t living with a constant soundtrack in their heads of what should have been, what could have been.
To begin with, she just drove. Simply packed as many clothes and toys into the car as she could and drove. Tom was a calm child even then, content in his chair in the back seat. They took the coast road south, staying in caravan parks and cheap motels. She made up stories if anyone asked her questions. She was going to meet up with her husband who worked on the oil rigs. She was bringing her baby to meet his grandparents for the first time, and no, unfortunately her husband hadn’t been able to get time off work. She said anything she could to stop herself from saying the truth. My husband was killed in a car accident three hours before our son was born.
She stayed in Queensland at first. After a month driving aimlessly from town to town, she rented a furnished apartment by the sea in a town south of Brisbane and stayed there, with Tom, for a year. She didn’t have to work. There was life insurance that she hadn’t even known Nick had taken out. If she was careful, it was enough to live on for several years. Not that she felt she could ever work again. She hadn’t turned on a computer or even picked up a pencil since the day Tom was born.
Her family visited, Nick’s family visited. Everyone tried to talk her into coming back home, but no one succeeded. As Tom’s second birthday and Nick’s second anniversary approached, she became restless again. There was more pressure from home. ‘We’re sad too. Let us grieve with you,’ was the message from everyone. Somewhere inside her, buried deep, she recognised that, but it was no help to her and she couldn’t help them. It was just her and Tom now.
The day before Tom’s birthday, she decided to move again. She needed the distraction. As she drove, she sang songs to Tom, all the songs she could think of, except ‘Happy Birthday’. It seemed too sad and unfair that he should share a date like that.
She spent the next twelve months in a small town in northern New South Wales. The next in Newcastle, five hours further down the coast. A year in another town south of Sydney. Her family still worried. Her sister tried being mad at her. ‘Nina, you’re just running away. It’s not good for you or for Tom, to be uprooted every twelve months like this. We miss you. Come back to Queensland.’ But she co
uldn’t. This constant movement was her life now. If she wasn’t going to have the life she’d dreamed about, the permanent, settled, ordinary life she and Nick had planned, then she was going to have these different, temporary lives. She told herself she liked it that way. It suited her personality. Twelve months was the perfect amount of time to stay in one place, long enough to gather some impressions, short enough not to form too many friendships.
‘But what do you do all day?’ Hilary wanted to know.
At first, Nina did only what needed to be done. She looked after Tom. It took every minute she had. She wondered constantly how it would have been if Nick had been there with her. Sometimes it was a hardship, the constancy of it, the repetitiveness of it. But there was also a rhythm, a soothing sameness to being this close to another person, a child that she loved. They were a team. It was the two of them against the world.
The year Tom turned five, there was more pressure from her family. ‘You have to stay in one place now Tom’s starting school,’ her sister said. ‘He needs stability. Come home.’
She considered it. She imagined Tom back in her home town in Queensland, in the local school, playing alongside the sons and daughters of people she’d been to school with herself. Her thoughts stopped there. Each of those sons and daughters and their parents knew it all. From the first day Tom set foot in the playground their story would follow him. Poor tragic Tom, born the day his father drove into a truck and killed himself.
‘Nick didn’t do it deliberately, Nina. It was an accident,’ Hilary said when Nina tried to explain her feelings.
‘It doesn’t matter. I hate that gossip about me and I don’t want it for Tom.’
‘Then do whatever you need to do,’ Hilary said, finally.
Nina kept moving, three times in Tom’s first three years of school. Not far each time, just to towns two or three hours away, but each move felt necessary. The school mothers always started to get too curious. She’d tried just not mentioning Tom’s father, but there was always one who asked. Was she divorced? Separated? If she finally said that he had died, even more questions would follow. ‘I’d rather not talk about it,’ she’d end up answering, knowing it sounded stuck-up but preferring that to telling the truth.
At Home with the Templetons Page 8
