The only hitch was Spencer. He surprised them both with his insistence on joining them.
‘I need a break. I’ve collected more than three thousand glasses in the past month. My hands are like claws. They’ll never open properly again. When I’m not battling drunks and glasses I’m hammering against every bloody door in any strand of media I can and all I’ve got in return are bleeding knuckles. It’s not me that needs a holiday in la belle France and bella Italia, it’s my poor tendons. I need it, I deserve it. Anyway, if it wasn’t for me, you’d never have got together. I’m the one who found Tom for you, Gracie. I’ll leave you alone to live love’s young French and Italian dream for three weeks and then join you for the last one. So where will we meet? Rome? All roads lead there, don’t they?’
From the moment she and Tom arrived on the ferry in Calais it was a special trip. Gracie had schoolgirl French and Tom had learnt it for two years at school in Melbourne. Between them they managed to get directions from one village to another, to negotiate nights in small hotels or pensions, order cheap and beautiful meals in little cafés and restaurants. They spent two days in Paris, and did everything tourists should: going to the top of the Eiffel Tower, on a cruise along the Seine, taking a walk up the Champs-Elysees, sipping champagne in the Latin Quarter. The rest of their time in France they stayed in rural villages, sitting in sunny squares, living on cheap wine, crusty bread, cheese, fruit. Two days in the glamorous south of France were enough for them both, the excess too much after their gentle meanderings. In Italy they were both without the language, but it didn’t matter. They pointed, tried in English or even French, so relaxed and at ease now that language seemed secondary to their needs. The weather was perfect, warm days, balmy nights. The Italian scenery bewitched them both. Golden yellow fields dotted with straight green cypress trees. Hilltop villages. Bustling cities. Sunlit piazzas. Noisy bars, enthusiastic conversations, friendly people. The sight of clothes drying on lines strung from balcony to balcony across cobblestoned alleys. Red geraniums on sunny stone steps. Gracie had never imagined a country could be so beautiful.
As they sat outside a café in Florence one afternoon drinking coffee in the sunshine, Tom surprised her by asking if she was still carrying the silver whistle he’d given her. Of course, she said. She took it from her handbag.
‘I’ll be right back,’ he said. She watched as he traced their steps back to a small side street lined with jewellery shops. He returned fifteen minutes later, with the whistle now nestling in a small velvet box. She took it out. He’d had it engraved. For Gracie with love from Tom. She’d already treasured it. Now it was even more perfect.
They talked constantly, about all they saw, where they were going, and increasingly about their future together. Could she come to Australia again soon? Tom asked. She could get work there, study, do whatever she wanted, he was sure of it.
Gracie had thought about it already. Thought a lot. It was the next big step in their relationship. Yet she hesitated before answering.
He noticed. ‘You don’t want to go to Australia again? You don’t like our animals? Our insects? I’ll kill them all. Just let me know which species to start with.’
She laughed. ‘I love your wildlife. I was thinking about visas, grown-up things like that.’
‘You won’t need a visa.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I’ll marry you.’
He was joking, she knew, but she went along with it. ‘Why, thank you, how kind. But I’m much too young to get married.’
‘We’ll just get engaged to begin with, then. We can get married on your fiftieth birthday.’
‘That was your proposal?’
‘Wasn’t it romantic enough?’ He smiled. ‘Sorry, Gracie. I’ll make up for it next time.’
From that day, whenever they found themselves in front of a landmark sight or looking at a beautiful view in any of the Italian towns or cities they visited, he asked her the same question. ‘Gracie Templeton, will you marry me?’
‘Of course, Tom,’ she said each time.
By the tenth proposal, she barely acknowledged it. ‘Sure. Do you feel like a coffee?’
As they’d arranged three weeks earlier in London, she checked her emails the day before Spencer was due to arrive. Sitting in a small internet café off the Piazza Navona in Rome, waiting for a computer to become free, she looked out at Tom, sitting on a stone bench, his face tilted up to the sun, his long legs stretched out in front of him. She smiled. She seemed to smile constantly these days. Tom had proposed to her again that morning, as they stood in front of the Trevi Fountain. She’d accepted with great enthusiasm for once, throwing her arms around him as though it was the first time, not the eleventh. A group of people behind them overheard and applauded.
Sitting down on some sunny steps a few streets on, he’d taken her hand, leaned back and said in a casual way, ‘I mean it, you know. I do want to marry you.’
About to joke back, she saw the expression on his face. He was serious. She bit her lip, her heart suddenly racing.
His expression changed. ‘But if you don’t want to, that’s fine. Honestly. Forget I even mentioned it.’
She laughed, unable to help herself. ‘Forget which proposal? All of them or just that last one?’
‘All of them. Forget I said anything.’ He smiled then. ‘No, don’t forget the third one, the one in the square in Siena. That was really something special. I want you to remember that one when you are old and grey in your nursing home, looking back on your youth and wondering whatever happened to that nice young cricketer you knew once.’
‘That nice young cricketer I hope will be sitting beside me in my nursing home?’
‘I’ll be there beside you? So you will have married me?’
‘No. I’m hoping you’ll have retrained as a nurse and be looking after me.’
He’d kissed her hand, then stood up in the graceful, easy motion he had, pulling her up beside him. ‘You will marry me one day, Gracie Templeton. You wait and see. Protest as much as you like, but it’s written in the stars.’
Looking out at him now from the Internet café, she smiled at the memory. Once Spencer had gone, when they were on their own again, she would talk about it with him, seriously. Talk about the two of them, seriously. Because she realised something that made her feel strange and excited and scared, all at once. The next time he proposed to her, she would say yes and she would mean it. She did want to marry him. She would move to Australia to be with him. Have children with him. All of it.
As her turn at the computer came up, she crossed her fingers, hoping Spencer had changed his mind, that his email would say he couldn’t make it after all. Her heart gave a lift when she read his subject line – Bad news – and then fell as she read on.
Don’t collapse with disappointment but can only join you for four nights not seven. I HAVE GOT A JOB IN THE MEDIA. An honest-to-God, no-nonsense paying job that doesn’t involve late nights or intoxicated wankers (myself excluded). Job is courier driver for a film production company. I know, it doesn’t sound like much, but it’s a start, the first of my stepping stones to media mogul-ness. My own van – all right, their own van – and all. It’s small, it’s white, it’s beautiful. I am in love with my van. Anyway, will fill you and Tom in over a Campari or twenty. Arriving Roma Termini 2pm Saturday. Be there or else. My last days of freedom. Will be in celebratory mood!
Gracie and Tom were waiting at the end of the platform when Spencer’s train came in. The sun was shining, the two of them hand in hand, as Spencer stepped out of his carriage and came striding and smiling towards them, oblivious to the fact he was about to ruin both their lives.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
On the other side of the world, Nina was sitting opposite Hilary at the kitchen table of the Templeton Hall apartment. Hilary had arrived that day for a brief holiday while her husband took their two-year-old daughter, Lucy, to stay with his parents. The table was covered in lunch leftovers as w
ell as a pile of the postcards sent by Gracie and Tom over the previous six weeks: brightly coloured images of London landmarks, Scottish mountains, Irish pubs and sunlit French and Italian villages.
Putting down the last of them, a card from Florence that had arrived the previous day, Hilary sighed. ‘Well, I think it’s absolutely gorgeous. Gracie and Tom a couple, imagine.’ She noticed her sister’s expression. ‘Why are you looking so unhappy?’
‘I’m not.’
‘Nina, I know you. What’s wrong? Aren’t you happy for them?’
‘It’s not about me being happy. It’s none of my business. It’s his life. He’s an adult. It’s up to him who he goes out with, what he does.’
Hilary laughed. ‘I’m sure that’s how you think you should feel, but I can also see that’s not how you really feel. Nina, it’s Tom and Gracie. Your Gracie. Don’t you think there’s something, I don’t know, perfect, about the two of them getting together? Fated?’ She picked up the postcards again. ‘She sounds over the moon, he’s so carefree, the two of them zipping around Europe together. I’m sick with jealousy. I know you must miss him, but —’
‘I miss him when he’s in Adelaide, let alone the other side of the world.’
‘He’s coming back, Nina. He won’t travel the globe for the rest of his life.’
‘No? What if he decides he wants to live in England with Gracie? You know he asked for an extra month’s leave from the academy? What if he gives up playing cricket permanently?’
‘Then I guess that’s what he’ll do. Or maybe she’ll come out here instead and they’ll spend the rest of their lives fruit-picking.’ Hilary laughed again. ‘Nina, he’s nearly twenty-one years old. A grown man. You can’t expect him never to have a girlfriend. And at least you know Gracie. It’s not like he’s met some complete stranger over there. Gracie’s one of the Templetons. Your Templetons.’
Nina abruptly stood up and started clearing the table. ‘They’re not my Templetons.’
‘Well, pardon me for stating the obvious, but short of being adopted by them yourself, you couldn’t get any closer, could you? You live in their apartment, you caretake their Hall, you and Eleanor are practically pen-pals —’
‘Hilary, I had an affair with Henry Templeton.’
Hilary’s mouth fell open. ‘I beg your pardon?’
Nina repeated it.
‘But how? When? Where?’
‘Here.’
‘Here? Here?’
Nina nodded.
Hilary was shocked. ‘But how could you do that to Eleanor?’
‘I didn’t do anything to Eleanor. They’d separated by then.’
‘Hold on a minute. This wasn’t when they were living in Templeton Hall?’
Nina shook her head. ‘It was last year. When he came back to —’
‘He came back last year?’ Hilary looked around as if she expected him to appear again. ‘And you didn’t tell me?’
‘I couldn’t at the time. I’m sorry, Hilary, but I just couldn’t.’
‘Tell me now,’ Hilary said.
It had been a warm Thursday afternoon. Nina was in her studio, tidying up, not painting, feeling restless and unsettled. Her contract teaching position at one of the local schools had finished for the year. What was left of her freelance work had slowed again too. She’d delivered her latest commission three days before deadline and waited to hear about her next project. And waited. Eventually, she’d rung the company’s office. It took three tries before her call was returned. We’ll keep you in mind if anything else comes up. It’s just … economic realities … computer technology … changing markets …
She got the message. Since then, the days had stretched out long and lonely. The nights felt even lonelier. It wasn’t that she was unused to being on her own. It had been that way since Tom had won his scholarship to his Melbourne school, coming home only some weekends and in the holidays. His visits had been even less frequent since he’d moved to the cricket academy in Adelaide. Lately she’d begun to wonder if it was good for her to be on her own this much. Would she be better living in town with neighbours to smile at, the main street a five-minute walk rather than a twenty-minute drive away?
There were still the advantages of her rent-free accommodation. She also still loved her surroundings: the gentle hills, the wide paddocks, that big sky, the Hall like a natural structure itself, the sandstone shifting between colours depending on the time of the day. But there was no mistaking the change in her thinking. A negative change. She wasn’t just physically lonely these days. It was an emotional loneliness. A deep, hidden, sad feeling that life had passed her by. That there was no longer the chance of something good, exciting or surprising happening to her.
She hadn’t talked about it with Hilary, or even with Jenny, her closest friend in Castlemaine. She didn’t have the right words for it yet. It had been creeping up on her since her fortieth birthday three years before, so slowly, so determinedly that she was reluctant to bring it out in the open in case it overwhelmed her completely. But it was there every day, when she looked at herself in the mirror and saw lines where there had been none, a softening of her jaw line, less sparkle in her eyes. She felt it when she got dressed each day and reached for clothes that she knew didn’t flatter her, but were comfortable. It was beyond the physical, too. It was as if her spirit had left her. As if she could no longer see the point of anything – of her work, of herself, of her life. She wasn’t suicidal, she knew that. She was … bored. Bored with herself, of what her life had become.
If her mother was there, if Hilary was there, more to the point, Nina knew what both of them would say. ‘It’s just a phase, a reaction to Tom growing up. Empty-nest syndrome. You just need to change your attitude, not your life. Come on. Spruce yourself up before you’ve nothing left to spruce.’
For the past week, she’d been trying that approach, starting from the outside, making herself wear make-up even if there was no one to see it but her. She put her sagging skirt and the old T-shirt with the tear under the left arm into the bin and started to wear the bright summer dresses, the expensive jeans, the silk tops she’d bought on a shopping trip to Melbourne with Hilary several years earlier. She even shaved her legs, gave herself face masks, plucked her eyebrows, did her nails. She felt ridiculous at first, like a teenager playing with her mother’s make-up, all dressed up with nowhere to go. What was the point? Who was looking at her? It wasn’t working, anyway, was it? That sad abandoned feeling was still there, under the bright clothes, beneath the make-up, as if that feeling of loneliness, that weariness, was part of her body now, had seeped into her skin. But she wouldn’t give into it. She couldn’t let herself give into it. Not yet.
When she heard the sound of a car that Thursday afternoon she wasn’t surprised. Despite the ‘Closed’ sign at the main highway turn-off, despite a second sign halfway up the driveway and a third sign where the car park used to be, determined visitors still sometimes made their way to Templeton Hall, lured by long-out-of-date entries in guidebooks. ‘When will it be open to the public again?’ she’d been asked countless times. ‘We heard it was hilarious back then. Whatever happened to that family anyway?’
She had a stock answer. ‘The Templetons had to go back to the UK for family reasons but they’re still hopeful to return one day.’ She’d said it so many times she didn’t know whether she believed it or not herself any more.
As she heard a car door closing, Nina hurriedly checked her reflection in the mirror, wiped off a smudge of dust from her forehead and made her way down the side path.
A man was standing, eyes shaded, staring up at the Hall.
‘Good afternoon,’ Nina called in a friendly tone. ‘Sorry, but we’re closed to the public.’
He turned, smiled and spoke. ‘I know. Hello, Nina.’
It took a second for her brain to take in his appearance, his use of her name. ‘Henry? Henry Templeton?’ She knew her mouth was open. ‘What on earth —’ She stopped and laug
hed. ‘I’m sorry. Did I miss a message? Did you tell me you were coming back?’
He came across to her, all smiles, kissing her on both cheeks, his manner as relaxed as if they’d seen each other a month before, not seven years before. He barely looked any older, though she knew he must now be in his mid-fifties at least. Tall, still lean, his face and figure as elegant as it had been the first time she saw him. His hair was greyer, perhaps, but his eyes were still as blue, his expression as intelligent and alive. ‘I’m afraid not. I didn’t know myself that I’d be coming back. A trip to Melbourne came up out of the blue, I had a spare afternoon and it seemed the car had a mind of its own and brought me here before I quite knew what was happening.’
‘You’re back for good? I mean, it’s great. It’s great to see you. It’s just a surprise.’ Nina switched into hostess mode. Awkward, surprised hostess, but a hostess nevertheless. ‘Come in. Come and have a drink, a tea, a coffee. But you’d want to look inside the Hall before anything else, wouldn’t you? If I’d known you were coming —’
‘You’d have baked a cake? Nina, relax, please. I’m not here to check up on you. Did you say would I like a drink? Do you know what I’d love? A dry, sharp, citrusy glass of local riesling, if you by any chance happened to have one to hand.’
At Home with the Templetons Page 29
