At Home with the Templetons

by Monica McInerney

  ‘With a photo of me in the wheelchair, dressed in white, looking pathetic?’

  ‘I hadn’t suggested that. Great idea. Could you cry on command for the photographer?’

  ‘Fuck off, Phillips.’ Tom was smiling.

  ‘Donovan, a reader doesn’t care if you’re lying in the bath writing your column or sitting in a wheelchair, mate. Get over yourself. Write the best stuff you can. We’ll take a look at it and see how it goes. And don’t hand in any old rubbish. I’ve pulled a few strings for you in the paper and it’s me who’ll look stupid if it doesn’t work out.’

  ‘You’re serious, aren’t you?’

  ‘Couldn’t be more serious.’ He paused. ‘There’s just one problem.’

  Tom waited.

  ‘Your name,’ Stuart said.

  ‘My name? What’s wrong with my name?’

  ‘Nothing in itself. Tom Donovan is a fine name. It’s just that as you might be aware you’re not the only man in town with that fine name.’ He threw a tabloid newspaper down on the table between them. It was turned to the sports pages, to a full-page comment piece by the city’s best-known, most opinionated and controversial newspaper and radio sports commentator, a former player in his mid-fifties called Tom Donovan. His article that day called for not just the current captain of the Australian cricket team to be sacked, but the entire team and the board.

  ‘But he’s been around for years. Everyone knows that Tom Donovan.’

  ‘Exactly. Which is why a new cricket column written by another Tom Donovan might cause some confusion. The Age’s sports editor suggested you write under another name and I agree. Not for the rest of your life, just for these columns. It’s no big deal. Anyway, how often do you get the chance to pick a new name for yourself?’

  ‘Any name I like?’

  Stuart nodded.

  ‘Donald Duck? I could call the column “Out for a Duck”.’

  Stuart’s lips twitched. ‘Very droll, Donovan. Maybe stay closer to home. What’s your middle name?’

  ‘My father’s name. Nicholas.’

  ‘That could work. Tom Nicholas. What do you think?’

  Tom thought about it. He liked it. He more than liked it.

  ‘Tom Nicholas it is,’ he said.

  Tom wrote his first column about his own experiences. Not about the accident. He wrote about his childhood memories, describing the process of learning to play cricket, the hours spent pitching the ball against the rainwater tank, the day he mastered one bowling technique, then another. The sheer pleasure of the game. There was a good response. He wrote a second column a month later. A third. He did an interview with a current Test bowler, over the phone, on the eve of a big match. It ran as a feature piece. The commissions kept coming. Sometimes finding the right words was as hard as the physical work he was still doing each day, but it was worth it, to see his name – his name and his father’s name, together – in print.

  His walking continued to improve. Two years and eight months after the accident, he moved from the clinic into his own flat, on the ground floor of a block in inner-city Richmond. Nina wanted to help him decorate it. He told her he’d do it himself and he did. He was determined to regain his independence in every way he could. He held Christmas lunch there, with Nina, his aunt Hilary, uncle Alex and cousin Lucy. He cooked. It was burnt but he still served it.

  He started spending each New Year’s Eve with the Phillips family: Stuart, his wife, their daughters and their partners. Emily, the second daughter, had had a whirlwind romance with and then married another of the academy players, Simon, also one of her father’s protégés. Tom had liked him very much in the academy days. In the years since, Simon had given up the game after one too many injuries and moved into sports marketing. He became, after Stuart, Tom’s closest friend.

  Another year passed. Another. He finished his journalism studies, graduating with high distinctions. He joined the full-time staff of the newspaper, still writing under Tom Nicholas. He liked the anonymity, he realised, even if all his friends and family knew it was him. Around the same time, Nina started working full-time as an art teacher in a small primary school in Brunswick, on the other side of the city to Richmond. She got him to come and talk to the kids occasionally, about writing, about cricket. They were always more interested in talking about the stick he still sometimes needed to use.

  Four years after the accident, his friends started matchmaking him.

  Simon was blunt. ‘Everything’s back in working order, isn’t it?’

  ‘No, Simon. They had to amputate it at the clinic. It was interfering with my balance.’

  Simon grinned. ‘Then it’s time we got you out into the social whirl again.’

  In the past four years Tom had gone out with five women. He’d been relieved to confirm that everything was in working order. But something was missing each time. He didn’t care enough about the women. Cared a little, almost a lot in one instance, but still not enough. He was the first to call a halt with two of them. The other three broke up with him, the most recent only six months ago. She’d been very angry. ‘You’re all locked away, Tom. You won’t let anyone near you, will you? You’ve got some ideal woman in your head, but you know what? She doesn’t exist!’

  Her accusation brought thoughts of Gracie rushing back again. He did his best to block them once more. She had been just a stage of his life. Even the accident was almost behind him. He barely limped any more. He now owned his own house, a small terraced cottage in Carlton. He had a good job, covering a sport he still loved, travelling throughout Australia, with more and more trips abroad. He’d already been to the West Indies this year. His editor had mentioned more overseas trips in the future. India. Maybe even England for the next Ashes series. But England meant Gracie. Would he try to track her down while he was there, for old time’s sake? To lay some ghosts to rest at last? She’d already been in his mind when the letter arrived from Hope. It seemed like fate. He didn’t need to wait until he was in England. Gracie was coming back to Australia.

  The biggest surprise after the letter arrived was his mother’s reaction. He’d called around to her the same afternoon he’d received it, phoning her from his car on the way.

  ‘Is everything all right?’ she’d said immediately.

  It was her default position since the accident, that something bad would happen to him again. ‘Everything’s fine. I just have to talk to you about something.’

  Hilary had been there too, on one of her regular visits to Melbourne. He kissed her hello, then waved in at ten-year-old Lucy, curled up on the sofa in the living room, watching TV. She gave him a sleepy wave back.

  After a coffee together, Hilary announced she and Lucy were going to catch the tram into town. Tom waited until they’d left before he showed Nina the letter from Hope.

  She read it, then folded it and put it on the bench, her hand on top of it. ‘I don’t want you to go back there, Tom.’

  He smiled. He was twenty-eight years old. He could and would go if he decided it was what he needed to do. Still, his tone was gentle. ‘And you’ll do what if I do go? Stop my pocket money? Ground me?’

  She wasn’t smiling. ‘Tom, please, don’t write back. Don’t accept the invitation. She’s not right in the head. She never has been.’

  ‘Did you get a letter from her as well?’

  A long hesitation, then she nodded.

  ‘Can I see it?’

  She shook her head. ‘It’s the same kind of thing as yours. Ramblings. You don’t need to see it.’

  ‘Would you have told me if I hadn’t shown you this one?’

  ‘I don’t know. Tom, please, ignore it. She’s trying to make trouble, I’m sure of it. She drank too much, took too many drugs. Her mind is damaged. God knows she’s probably making the whole thing up. You could arrive there and the place will be empty. It’ll just open up old wounds again. Tom, please. I’m begging you.’

  He told her he hadn’t decided what to do about it yet. It was
only in the car on the way home that he realised neither of them had mentioned Gracie.

  At home the next night he had a phone call from his aunt Hilary.

  ‘Nina’s told me about the letter from the Templetons, Tom. From Hope.’

  Tom waited.

  ‘Don’t go, please. For Nina’s sake. It’ll bring back too many bad memories for her, all that happened with the Templetons, having to leave the Hall like that. It was a terrible time for her.’

  ‘For her?’ He managed a laugh.

  ‘All any mother wants to do is protect their child from pain and harm, and she felt like she failed you in some way.’

  ‘Hilary, what happened in Italy had nothing to do with Nina. She wasn’t driving the car. Or the truck.’

  ‘It’s more complicated than that. Tom, please, don’t rush into anything. Sometimes it’s better to just leave the past behind, for everyone’s sake.’

  It was a week later, sorting through a box of his old clothes and belongings that had come from the Templeton Hall apartment and not been unpacked, that he found it. The key to the Hall. He recognised it immediately, with its large brass handle, like something from a fairytale, a souvenir from his own childhood. Spencer had given it to him one afternoon, when they’d come back from the dam. ‘We’ve got loads of these. Mum and Dad will never miss it,’ he’d said to Tom. ‘You’ll be able to get in whenever you want to now.’

  Finding it was a sign, Tom decided. The fact he still even had it meant something, surely? After the accident, when he learnt that Nina had moved all they owned out of the Hall apartment in one afternoon, returning everything belonging to the Templetons to the Castlemaine solicitors, it had crossed his mind to tell her about it, to ask her to find it and return it then too. But he hadn’t.

  He decided that day. He would get in touch with Hope, find out when Gracie was arriving and go back to Templeton Hall. And if it would hurt his mother to know he was going, there was only one way around it. He wouldn’t tell her. He would ask Hope not to tell her either.

  His phone conversation with Hope lasted less than a minute. ‘You’re coming?’ she said briskly. ‘Good. Here are our flight details. We’ll leave any further conversation until we’re face to face.’

  As the date of Gracie’s arrival grew closer, the parting lines from one of his recent girlfriends kept echoing in his mind. ‘You’ve got some ideal woman in your head but you know what? She doesn’t exist!’

  But she did. Gracie had been that ideal woman, back when he was young, hopeful, full of vitality and optimism. He needed to see Gracie one more time, realise that he had built her up to be something she wasn’t. He’d made her too sweet, too smart, too beautiful, too everything. If he saw her again, reminded himself that she had shown her true colours by deserting him when he needed her most, then he’d be able to move on. He just needed to be sure to protect himself first. Present himself in the best possible light. Do everything he could to avoid even a flash of pity in Gracie’s eyes.

  So why hadn’t his plan worked? Why had seeing Gracie felt like a punch to the stomach?

  ‘You two have unfinished business,’ Emily had said. ‘I think you should cancel that plane ticket to Perth and drive straight back there.’

  ‘Drink, sir?’

  It was the flight attendant. He asked for an orange juice, then reached for his laptop. Enough thinking. It was time for work. Going over and over what had happened at Templeton Hall today was fruitless, no matter what Emily or Simon said. He was on his way to Perth, about to start filing stories, interviewing players, analysing the day’s play. This was his real life now. He’d done what he’d planned – seen her again, confronted his ghosts – and he could at last move on. All of that was behind him now. The Templetons, Templeton Hall, Gracie.

  He didn’t fool himself for a minute.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  In Melbourne, Nina was sitting under an umbrella at her local swimming pool, watching Lucy splash around. She shaded her face as Hilary came back from the kiosk carrying cool drinks and an ice-cream each.

  ‘Deep in thought?’

  Nina nodded.

  ‘Please don’t tell me you’re thinking about the Templetons.’

  ‘Just a little.’

  ‘Just constantly. You think I haven’t noticed you glancing at the calendar every day? After I went to all this trouble to visit you again, to try and distract you?’

  ‘If I could just be a fly on the wall —’

  ‘That charming Hope would probably swat you, by the sounds of things. Nina, stop thinking about them. You made your decision, Tom made his.’

  ‘We think he made his.’

  ‘He texted you from the airport, didn’t he? On his way to Perth?’

  Nina nodded. ‘You’re right.’

  ‘But if you don’t mind me saying, would it have really mattered if he did go? You had your reasons, and fair enough, but the more I think about it, perhaps it would have been good for Tom to see Gracie again, to find out once and for all why she abandoned him like that.’

  Nina busied herself opening her drink.

  Hilary continued. ‘I still find it so weird that she never even tried to get in contact with him again. Eleanor I can understand, especially after you let slip about what happened with you and Henry. But from what you used to tell me about Gracie, she seemed so much kinder than that.’

  After a pause, Nina answered. ‘Yes.’ She stood up then and went over to her niece with a towel. When she came back, she was careful to talk about anything but the Templetons.

  Twenty-four hours later, the three of them were in Nina’s car on their way to the airport, in plenty of time for Hilary and Lucy’s flight home to Cairns. Usually Nina dropped her sister and niece in front of the airport, leaving them to check in and make their own way to the gate, none of them liking the farewell moment. This time was different.

  ‘I have to talk to you about something, Hilary,’ Nina said as they drove into the airport grounds.

  Hilary noticed her sister’s serious expression. ‘I’m all ears,’ she said.

  They found a café opposite a gift shop in the domestic terminal, took a table in the corner and settled Lucy with a book and her iPod. Once she was occupied, Nina spoke.

  ‘I need to tell you why I didn’t want Tom to go back to Templeton Hall.’

  ‘That’s what this is about? Look, I understand, Nina. It’s fine.’ ‘You can’t understand because I haven’t told you everything.’

  Hilary waited.

  Nina took a breath. ‘If he’d gone there, he would have seen Gracie again. Talked to her again. And if he’d done that, he would have …’ She stopped.

  ‘He would have what?’

  There was a pause before Nina spoke again. ‘He would have found out about her letters.’

  ‘What letters?’

  ‘The letters she sent him, after the accident.’

  Hilary frowned. ‘But you told me that he never heard from her again. That she told you in Rome that she didn’t want anything to do with him again.’

  ‘I didn’t speak to Gracie after the accident. I only spoke to Eleanor.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  Hilary listened in silence as Nina told her everything. How Gracie had written to Tom many, many times. How the letters had been sent to dozens of different addresses, each of them eventually finding their way to Nina.

  ‘But you didn’t pass them on to him?’ Hilary stared at her sister. ‘Nina, you had no right. The letters were to him.’

  ‘I had every right. I’m his mother. Hilary, you saw him, saw how badly he was injured, how fragile he was.’

  ‘But she was his girlfriend.’

  ‘He was in a mess, Hilary. Physically, emotionally. I didn’t want him upset any more.’

  ‘How would a letter from his girlfriend upset him? Wouldn’t he have longed for that?’

  ‘I couldn’t be sure. I couldn’t ask him, either.’

  ‘Why not?’


  ‘Hilary, it was a terrible time. When I read Gracie’s letters —’

  ‘You read her letters? Her letters to Tom? You had no right to do that either.’

  ‘It had nothing to do with right or wrong. Wouldn’t you do anything you could, anything, to stop Lucy being hurt? If you felt there might be danger, wouldn’t you stop her doing something? I didn’t know what Gracie might be saying to him, if she would hurt him even more. I didn’t know if she knew about me, about me and Henry. I was angry. I was shocked.’

  ‘But this was Tom’s life, not your life. His relationship with Gracie, not yours. Nina, I can’t believe this. You have to tell him she wrote to him. Now. As soon as you can.’

  ‘It’s too late.’

  ‘But he must have always wondered. He must have wanted to write to her.’

  ‘He did.’ A long pause. ‘I didn’t post his letters.’ She spoke quickly, before Hilary had a chance to react. ‘I thought it was for the best. I had to cut off all contact between our families, for all our sakes.’

  ‘So you let Tom think you’d posted them, let him wait to hear back from Gracie, knowing all the time that Gracie hadn’t even received his letters? You didn’t pass on the letters she had sent him, because you thought that was protecting him?’

  A nod. Nina waited for her sister’s understanding. Instead, she got her fury.

  ‘How dare you, Nina! How dare you do that to Tom, to Gracie.’ In the background, their flight was called. Hilary didn’t move, just continued to speak in a low, cold voice. ‘I thought I knew you, understood you, but I was wrong. I don’t know you at all. Was this about Tom or was this about you? You and Henry? Anger at Henry because you never heard from him again?’

  Nina could only stare at her sister.

  ‘I thought you’d learnt your lesson when Tom was little, with the lies you told him about his father’s death.’

  ‘That’s not fair. You know why I did that, how much I agonised over it.’

  ‘And yet you did it again? Lied to him again? Can’t you see how wrong it was?’

  ‘It wasn’t. It was what he wanted too. I asked him once, about a year after the accident, if he wanted to get in touch with Gracie. He said no.’