From her position in the wings, she could hear the other actors saying their lines, word-perfect, their timing spot on. The scene was moving swiftly, leading up to the moment of her entrance. She wanted to run away. She would run except she was suddenly frozen. She knew with complete certainty that if she stepped from here to there, onto that stage, in front of that audience, she would not be able to speak. All her preparation had been for nothing. There were no lines in her head, just white noise, the sound of her fear. Her breathing was shallow and noisy, too noisy. She felt a touch on her hand, the drama teacher, there beside her, an encouraging smile on his face, but it was too late. She couldn’t do it. She thought of her family in the audience. Her friends and classmates. No one would applaud her, she knew it. They’d laugh at her, talk about her dismal performance. She couldn’t go out there. She couldn’t.
Her entrance line came. Once. Twice. She heard the actor say it a third time, her expression changing, alarm registering, knew she was thinking, ‘What’s wrong? Get out here.’ Audrey couldn’t move. Her teacher touched her arm. ‘Audrey, that’s your cue. Go.’ She couldn’t. Something had happened to her body. It had turned to stone.
‘Audrey, go!’
She went. His push – not gentle that time – propelled her. Before she knew what had happened she was on the stage. The spotlights were shining on her. She could feel the sweat beading on her forehead, under her arms, in the small of her back. The other girls on the stage were staring at her. Waiting for her. She took a step back. She heard her line being hissed from the prompter at the side of the stage. It sounded like more white noise.
She took another step back and bumped against a piece of scenery. Her eyes adjusted to the lights. She could see the audience now. Hundreds of people. Rows of them, staring at her. Waiting for her. Wanting to hear her talk. But there was nothing in her head, no words on her tongue. She was speechless, movement-less, filled with only terror.
A hiss from off-stage. ‘Come on, Audrey. Do something. Say something.’
Do what? Say what? She couldn’t remember anything. Anything at all. She heard the laughter and the chatter start from the back of the hall. It was like a wave coming at her, building into a flood. They were laughing at her. All of them. She heard voices from close by, the other actors, hissing at her. She could see the hatred in their faces. They’d always hated her. They’d made that clear in the final rehearsals, gossiping about her, jealous of her. She’d known that, but now they were furious with her too. More laughter from the audience. How long had she been standing there? A minute? More? Less?
She opened her mouth. Nothing. No sound. She tried again. A squeak. A squeak like a mouse, like a door needing oil. A stupid, silly, ridiculous sound. This time there was no mistaking the laughter. One of the other girls on the stage had the giggles now too. Audrey could hear her, mocking her, laughing at her. Everyone in the auditorium was staring at her now, laughing at her, laughing at her. She couldn’t bear it. Didn’t anyone understand what this meant to her? This was everything to her. She turned, eyes panicked, to see the teacher preparing the understudy, to see the other girl struggling into a costume …
No, it couldn’t happen. They had to let her stay on. She’d find her voice, she would. She was trying. Couldn’t they see that? She opened her mouth. Another squeak.
She felt a hand on her arm, one of the other actors. Her face was angry, her grip tight, her nails digging into Audrey’s arm, as if she was going to drag her off the stage, there, now, in front of everyone. No. No! She wouldn’t let her. How dare she even try. Audrey took a step back, wrenching her arm away, bumping into another actor she hadn’t seen. She turned to apologise, no sound, still nothing, turned again, tripped on her long dress and started to fall. For a second she found her balance, but as quickly she lost it again. The sound she made as she crashed to the floor, her dress riding up around her bare legs, sounded like a thunderclap.
‘Is she drunk?’ she heard someone ask, their voice loud, too loud. More ripples of sound from the audience, whispering, giggling, laughing. She tried to get up. She couldn’t. She couldn’t. Her dress was tangled around her body, her limbs felt numb. She wanted to talk, she wanted to say her lines, she wanted to insist she wasn’t drunk, of course she wasn’t drunk, but she couldn’t seem to move, to talk, to find even a single word.
She started crying, the tears spilling from her eyes. Somehow dragging herself to the edge of the stage, she curled into a tight ball, her head tucked against her knees, wishing, hoping, feeling as though she was going to die. She could barely hear the commotion around her, hisses, brief arguments, until somehow she registered that the play was continuing. Against a murmur of voices, even laughs from the audience, she saw from her huddled position on the floor that the understudy was now on stage, her dress only half done up, reading from a battered script, her voice like a monotone, instead of Audrey, in her costume, her lines perfect, delivering a moving and triumphant performance …
The rest of the play passed in a daze for her. Within minutes of the curtain falling, she was surrounded by the actors, the stagehands, anyone who’d had anything to do with the play. The play she had just ruined. She still couldn’t talk, couldn’t explain, couldn’t untangle her limbs, couldn’t stand up. All she could do was stay curled in that ball, unable to stop crying silent tears, sick and heartbroken and as lonely as she had ever felt. She had not just ruined her acting career. She had ruined her life.
Charlotte appeared, pushing through the crowd, grabbing her arm. ‘What is it? Are you sick?’
Audrey could only shake her head.
‘What is it, then? Audrey, what happened?’
A girl beside them spoke up, her voice angry. ‘Stage fright, allegedly.’
Another girl scoffed. ‘She’s the one who said she knew this whole play backwards. She’s been telling us all for weeks how to do our parts.’
Charlotte dragged Audrey up from the ground with difficulty and began to pull her through the crowd. ‘Let us through, please. Let us through.’
Audrey was now powerless. She’d rehearsed every moment in her head, imagining herself on the stage bowing after a victorious performance, accepting the bouquets of flowers. Not this, something so terrible. A river she couldn’t cross, a black chasm, so wide and so deep and so frightening. It could never happen again. She could never again set foot in that school, talk about acting, talk about anything, ever, ever again.
At Templeton Hall, Nina’s ‘housesitting’ with Hope was not going well. She had guessed it wouldn’t, within minutes of arriving at the Hall with Tom that afternoon.
‘I’m so sorry, Nina,’ Eleanor had said. ‘Hope was fine this morning, fine at lunch, but she hasn’t come out of her room since just after two o’clock.’
‘Should I go and say something through the door? Just let her know I’m here? She does know I’m here, doesn’t she?’
‘She does. Yes.’ Eleanor hesitated. ‘We reminded her today you were coming. That’s when she locked herself in her room.’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ Nina said as cheerily as possible. ‘If she wants to come down and join us, that’s great, and if she doesn’t, that’s fine too.’
‘We’ll leave Melbourne straight after breakfast tomorrow,’ Eleanor said. ‘We’ll be back before lunchtime. Before eleven, hopefully.’
‘Take your time. Don’t rush. We’ll be fine.’
Fine? If only, Nina thought now as she walked up the stairs again, calling Hope’s name once more. Since Tom had casually told her that Hope’s bedroom door was open but the room empty, they’d been roaming the house, calling her name. There was no reply.
‘She must have gone outside,’ Tom said. ‘We’ve looked in every room.’
‘I didn’t hear the front door open, did you?’ Nina checked the time. Only nine p.m. It was going to be a long night. ‘Hope?’ she called again. ‘Hope, please, come out.’
It was during their second search of the house that she appear
ed. Nina and Tom had just come down the stairs once again when the front door opened and Hope walked in. She was wearing a dressing-gown and a shawl. Her feet were bare.
‘Hope, thank God,’ Nina said, unable to hide her relief. ‘I’ve been so worried.’
Hope barely looked at her. There was no acknowledgement that they’d met before, either. ‘Really? Why?’
‘Because Eleanor asked me —’ She stopped, as Hope gave her a very unpleasant smile.
‘Asked you what?’ Hope said. ‘To look after me? How amusing. Because Eleanor told me that you and your son were here to look after the Hall. And that being the case, I decided it made sense to leave you both to it and take a nice evening walk.’
She smiled as she saw Nina glance towards the phone. ‘Go on, ring Eleanor. Right in the middle of Audrey’s special night. You think I don’t know where they are? I’m her godmother, you know. Nice of them to invite me, wasn’t it?’
‘They didn’t think you were …’ Nina tried to choose the right words, ‘well enough.’
Hope scoffed. ‘You have absolutely no idea what they think, and if you do, you shouldn’t. You’re our neighbour by accident of geography. It doesn’t give you any right to know me, to babysit me —’ she nearly spat the word, ‘or to know our family business.’
Nina kept her voice neutral with some difficulty. ‘I don’t want to know your family business. Eleanor simply asked me for a favour and I was happy to help out.’
‘Oh, I can just see how she would have done that.’ Hope changed her voice, put on a sweet expression, ‘ “We do all we can for poor Hope, but I’m afraid it’s just take-take-take with her.” It’s lies. All of it. I gave up my own life for her, for all of them, to come here, design their entire property. Do I get any thanks? Do I get to show people around any more? No!’
Nina turned and gestured to Tom to go into the living room. She didn’t want him to hear this. He wasn’t happy to go, but he did. After he’d shut the door, she turned back to Hope. ‘Hope, I’m sure Henry and Eleanor would be happy to let you take some groups —’
‘You aren’t sure. You have no idea. You don’t know us. Stop pretending that you do. She’s just using you, like they used me. They started with your son, trying to keep Spencer out of juvenile detention, but it won’t work, and it’s your son that will be spoiled. You don’t know half of what the two of them get up to, do you? He’s a bad child, that Spencer. Oh, he’s high-spirited, they say. He’s not. He’s bad. Evil. And he’ll damage your son too. I mean it.’
Nina refused to rise to Hope’s bait.
The other woman kept talking. ‘You’ll regret getting mixed up with this family, you know. They’ll suck you dry like they sucked me dry. But don’t say you weren’t warned. You or your son. Get away while you still can. I wish I had.’
Nina could only stand open-mouthed as Hope stalked past her and up the stairs.
Tom went up to bed not long after. Nina talked down her own nerves as she walked around turning off the lights, ignoring the creaks as the Hall settled itself at the end of the day. The altercation with Hope echoed around her. Her words had struck too many chords with Nina.
She suddenly didn’t want to be at the Hall any more. She wanted to be home, just her and Tom, in their own small house, as far from the whole Templeton family as possible. Hope was right. It had been a mistake to let Tom play with Spencer, a mistake to let Gracie visit her so often, a mistake to allow herself to be pulled into their orbit. She should have trusted her instincts and kept her distance.
By the time she’d finally locked all the doors and climbed into bed in one of the spare rooms – twice the size of her own room at home and furnished with so many antiques she was nervous to touch anything – her mind was made up. It was time to pull away from them all. It was the best thing, for her and for Tom.
A noise woke her at three a.m. Her heart started beating faster as she lay trying to work out what it was. A door opening. Footsteps. Low voices. Instantly wide awake, she got out of bed, tiptoed to the doorway and glanced down the hallway. Hope’s door was shut. She quickly checked Tom, in Spencer’s room, also furnished – incongruously – with antiques. He was asleep. She heard more whispers downstairs, the creak of a floorboard. Then a deeper voice. Henry Templeton’s voice.
She came to the top of the stairs and looked down just as the lights came on. In the entrance hall were Eleanor, Gracie, Spencer, Henry and a young woman Nina knew had to be Audrey. Nina hadn’t realised she was coming back with them. She moved quickly down the stairs, pulling her dressing-gown around her. ‘You’re back already?’
‘An unexpected change of plan,’ Eleanor said, with the quickest of glances in Audrey’s direction. ‘Did everything go all right here?’
Nina noticed Audrey’s miserable face. Gracie looked like she’d been crying. Henry and Eleanor were tense, Spencer tired and mutinous. Something bad must have happened, with Charlotte, perhaps. Something Eleanor couldn’t share yet. Fine, Nina thought. If she was going to try keeping her distance from this family, she’d start now.
She found a smile from somewhere. ‘Everything was just fine,’ she lied.
Less than twelve hours later, Nina was back in her own living room, trying and failing to do some work, tired and nervy from lack of sleep. She and Tom had left the Hall before the others woke, leaving a note on the kitchen table. Tom wasn’t happy, even when she explained that something had happened in Melbourne and the family needed time alone.
‘But Spencer and I had plans for this morning. I don’t have to be at cricket until after lunch.’
Nina stood her ground. He took out his anger on her by spending an hour throwing a cricket ball against the rainwater tank. Good for his cricket practice, bad for her nerves. It would have to be like this to begin with, she told herself. He’d forget about Spencer and the Templetons eventually. She was quietly relieved when he was collected for the match by her friend Jenny, leaving her in peace to do some work at last.
It was short-lived. She’d just started work when she heard her name being called. Moments later, the front door opened and Gracie walked in without knocking, immediately launching into a detailed account of the night’s events in Melbourne.
‘… so it’s just a tragedy, Nina,’ Gracie said as she finished. ‘Audrey’s big dream to be an actress is in ruins and she’s inconsolable. Mum has tried bringing her breakfast in bed, magazines; Dad even brought a TV into her room to distract her, but nothing has worked. She won’t speak, she won’t eat, she won’t stop crying. I can see why, the poor thing. As I said to her, what can she do with her life now that her dream has been shattered?’
Nina kept her reply matter-of-fact. ‘Gracie, her dream isn’t shattered. It was just a bad case of stage fright. She’ll have another chance in another play at school.’
‘She won’t. She wrote Mum a note to say she can never go back there again. They all hate her now. It’s a very competitive school, you see. Cut-throat. Charlotte told me all about it today.’
‘Charlotte’s home too?’ Nina asked. She didn’t remember seeing her with the others.
‘Oh, no. We spoke on the phone this morning. She’s still insisting she won’t come back while Hope’s here.’ Gracie lowered her voice. ‘Can I tell you a secret?’
Nina’s vow not to get caught up in the Templetons’ lives any more wasn’t going well. She nodded.
‘I think Charlotte’s up to something,’ Gracie said. ‘Something exciting. I asked her what she was going to do when she finishes school this year, once she turns eighteen, and she whispered that everything was organised, it was a very exciting plan and she’d tell me as soon as she could. I think it might have something to do with going away. She said to me in a very mysterious voice, “Have passport, will travel, Gracie.” What do you think she means? She hasn’t got any money, none of us do, so where could she afford to go?’
‘I don’t know, Gracie.’
Gracie looked up at Nina with a sad expression.
‘I think we need a cup of tea, don’t you? Can I make you one, Nina? You must be tired after your late night too?’
Nina’s resolve faltered. Gracie was right. She was tired and she would like a cup of tea. It looked like she’d have to put off her withdrawal from the Templetons for one more day.
They were just finishing their tea when they heard the sound of a car. Seconds later the back door opened and Tom ran in, dressed in his cricket whites. Nina glanced at the clock. He was home early. Before she had a chance to ask why, he threw his arms around her and to her astonishment tried and nearly succeeded in lifting her up off the ground.
‘I’m in, Mum. I’m in the team!’
‘You are?’ For a second she didn’t know what he was talking about, until she remembered that he and his friend Ben had been involved in cricket trials today. With everything happening at Templeton Hall, it had slipped her mind.
‘Ben got picked too! Both of us!’ He threw his cricket gloves up into the air and caught them with a leap.
‘Tom, that’s fantastic! Congratulations!’ Nina pulled her son into another, proper hug. He let her, any tension between them now gone.
He turned and noticed their visitor then, stepping back from the hug immediately. ‘Gracie, hi. I didn’t see you there.’
‘Congratulations, Tom!’ Gracie beamed at him. ‘You’ve made a team for something?’
He nodded, shy and proud at once. ‘It’s part of a national competition. I’ve been picked for the junior country team. If we win against the city team next month, we get to play against all the other states, maybe even internationally.’
‘Tom, that’s fantastic!’ She threw her arms around him too. ‘What sport is it?’
‘Gracie,’ Tom said, all shyness now gone. ‘Cricket, of course. I’m a fast bowler.’
‘Oh, I love cricket! We all do, Dad especially. When’s your big match? Can we come and watch too? Will you come over to the Hall now and tell everyone? We need cheering up.’
Nina stepped in. ‘He can’t, Gracie. Sorry.’
At Home with the Templetons Page 17
