At Home With The Templetons

London October, 2009

From the moment Gracie Templeton knew she was going back to the Hall, she started to see him again.

He walked past her in the Tube station. She saw him studying at a table in the local library, his head bowed, engrossed in a book. Every second customer in the restaurant where she worked part-time sounded like him. An actor on TV had his shy smile. Everywhere she went, there was a man who reminded her of him, the same height, six foot three. The same dark curls. The easy, lanky walk. The same clothes - faded jeans, a dark reefer jacket. For eight years she’d been trying to put him out of her mind, to forget him, to rebuild her life. Now it was as if no time had passed at all.

As she watched the departure date grow closer, packed her suitcase, tidied her flat, she could think only of him. Three days before her flight, she gave in. Even as she typed his name into an Internet search engine, she knew it was a mistake. When his name appeared, she clicked on the link and began to read, then turned quickly away, shutting the laptop, breaking the connection. Quickly but not quickly enough. A line from the entry had leapt out at her: A promising career cut short - If she’d dared to read-on, would she have seen her name there? A promising career cut short by Gracie Templeton.

The phrase haunted her throughout the twenty-two-hour flight. Until, there she was, stepping out into Melbourne airport for the first time in sixteen years.

The man behind the car-hire desk was the perfect mixture of efficiency and good humour. ‘That’s all great, Gracie Templeton aged twenty-seven of London, thank you.’ He handed her English driver’s licence back across the desk. ‘So, is this your first time here?’

Gracie hesitated, then shook her head. ‘I used to live here, with my family. For three years.’

‘But you all left again? Summer got too hot?’ ‘Something like that,’ she said.

Minutes later she was in the small hire car, breathing in the too-sweet air-freshener fumes, unfolding the map and plotting her route. It was unsettling to see the place names again. Turning up the radio loudly to drown out her thoughts, she focused her attention on the road ahead.

Just over an hour later, something about the landscape made her slow down. A sign came into view: Castlemaine 25 km. She wasn’t far away now. She hadn’t been sure she would find her way so easily. There were no longer any roadside signs pointing to the Hall, after all. But it felt so familiar. The broad paddocks, gentle tree-covered hills, the big sky, the space. So much light and space. She stopped briefly to double-check her map and the smell when she opened the car door almost overwhelmed her: warm soil, gum leaves, the scents of her childhood.

Five kilometres later, she was at the turn-off. The huge gum tree at the junction of the highway and the dirt driveway had

always been their landmark. She indicated left and drove slowly, jolting over potholes and loose stones. As she tried to negotiate her way around the worst of them, she saw broken tree branches, crooked posts, gaps in the fencing. Her father would never have let the approach road look this uncared for. ‘First impressions are everything, my darlings,’ she could almost hear him saying.

The closer she came, the more neglect she saw: uneven patches of grass where there had once been smooth green lawn, bare brown earth where she’d once picked flowers, rows of fruit trees now left to grow wild, their branches heavy with unpicked, rotting fruit.

One final bend of the driveway and there it was in front of her. Templeton Hall.

She slowly brought the car to a halt, feeling as though her heart was trying to beat its way out of her chest. She’d expected the building to look smaller, but it seemed bigger. Two storeys high, large shuttered windows, an imposing front door reached by a flight of wide steps made from the same golden sandstone as the house itself. It needed painting, several roof tiles were broken and one of the window shutters was missing a slat, but it was still standing, almost glowing in the bright sunshine, as beautiful as she remembered.

As she walked towards it, the sound of the gravel crunching beneath her shoes mingled with unfamiliar bird calls from the. trees all around. She automatically reached for her talisman, the antique silver whistle she always carried in her bag, holding it tight in her hand. He’d given it to her when she was just a child. Back then it had been a good luck charm. Now it was her only reminder of him.

She climbed the first step, the second, the third, wishing, too late, that she hadn’t offered to arrive early, hadn’t volunteered to be the first to step back inside the Hall again.

The front door opened before she had a chance to put the key in the lock.

In the seconds before her eyes adjusted completely from the bright sunlight, she registered only that a man was standing there. A tall man with dark, curly hair, holding something in his right hand. As she saw his face, she felt a rushing sensation from her head to her feet. She heard herself say his name as if from a long distance away.

‘Tom?’ She tried again. ‘Tom?’ ‘Hello, Gracie.’

He took a step forward into the light. ‘I’ve been waiting for you,’ he said.

Templeton Hall, Victorian Goldfields, Australia 1993

Gracie Templeton had just turned eleven when she discovered there were people who didn’t like her family as much as she did. It was Saturday morning, June fifth. She woke at seven, knocked on her two older sisters’ bedroom doors, waited for them to shout at her to go away, then knocked again, twice as loudly. Ignoring their second wave of sleepy insults, she went in search of her little brother. He was inclined to sleep in cupboards rather than in his bed, but on this particular Saturday he was, surprisingly, in his bedroom. Under his bed, rather than on it, but easy to find at least. After three failed attempts to wake him, she returned to her own small bedroom at the back of the east wing, the one with blue wallpaper that her father called the Red Room, for reasons he seemed to find funny and she didn’t quite understand.

It was the first Saturday of the month and Gracie’s turn to be the head of the house. She put on the well-ironed long blue cotton dress she’d hung up in her wardrobe the previous evening, adjusted her petticoats, tied on her apron, brushed her unfortunately fly-away white-blonde hair until it was a little less fly-away, checked that her black patent-leather shoes were shining and her bonnet neatly fastened. After a final look in the mirror, she went downstairs and opened up the dining room, the library and the morning room. She switched on all fifteen of the lamps, from the small table ones with the coloured glass shades to the large standard models with the heavy brocade covers. Next, she polished the diningroom table. It was eight foot long and four foot wide and she couldn’t quite reach the middle of it, but with the lamps turned low she hoped any dust wouldn’t show.

She lit the incense in the small Chinese-themed room. She straightened the rugs in the entrance hall, tweaked the runner on the main staircase (it always seemed to stick on the fifth stair) and turned the bronze statuette of Athena on the side-table in the smoking room so it was correctly facing forward rather than staring at the wall. Her brother, Spencer, thought it was funny to move the statue around in unexpected ways and at unexpected times. One Saturday Gracie was about to open the heavy front door and welcome the first of the day’s visitors to Templeton Hall when she noticed Athena was standing on her head, balanced precariously against the wall, her bronze legs akimbo. Gracie only just had time to rescue her before the first visitor appeared.

Returning to the morning room, Gracie used a broomstick to gently nudge the portrait of her great-grandfather above the fireplace back into position (it tended to tilt to the left) and set

a record of

Beethoven’s sonatas playing on the old gramophone in the corner.

That was her preparation almost done. Even though she’d checked the appointments book the night before, she checked it again, trying to memorise where each group was coming from. Her sisters, Charlotte and Audrey, always mocked her diligence.

‘Who cares who they are or where they come from?’ Audrey would often say. ‘They’re just tourists, Gracie. Here to pay our bills for us.’

‘Not tourists, stickybeaks,’ Charlotte would correct her. ‘People with more money than sense.’

For years, Gracie had heard that saying as ‘more money than cents’, which didn’t make any sense to her at all. Not that she dared ask Charlotte for an explanation. She’d learnt from an early age that it was best not to question any of Charlotte’s pronouncements. There was less chance of being a victim of her sharp tongue that way. Her ‘legendary’ sharp tongue, as Charlotte herself proudly referred to it.

Gracie loved both her big sisters, but preferred them separately rather than together. Seventeen-year-old Charlotte was quick-tempered, but on her own she could also be surprisingly patient. And if sixteen-year-old Audrey wasn’t busy gazing at herself in the mirror or complaining that she wasn’t receiving enough attention from their parents, she could be quite kind to Gracie.

At least their father approved of his youngest daughter’s passionate interest in the Hall. ‘That’s my girl,’ Henry would say if he came across Gracie sitting on the staircase with the appointments book. ‘If only the others were as good at this whole malarkey as you.’

‘I am as good at this whole malarkey,’ Charlotte said once, overhearing. ‘Better, probably. I just can’t be bothered. There’s a difference.’

Gracie put the book back neatly where she’d found it. This morning was going to be busy. The first group was due in at ten, and three others before lunch, but as all the Templetons knew

from experience, casual visitors could also arrive at the Hall any time. She caught sight of the family motto written in curling Gothic script around a framed portrait of her grandfather, Tobias Templeton. It was in Latin, but her father had translated it for her - loosely, he explained - as ‘Fail to prepare; prepare to fail’.

Gracie would never admit it to her sisters, or to Spencer, but that motto was like a life message to her. She did her best with her schoolwork and her share of the housework and gardening, but she really tried to be prepared when it came to the family business. She bit her lip as she stood in the hallway, mentally checking her to-do list. Something was missing. She walked through the rooms again until it hit her. Flowers! There were no flowers. And there had to be flowers.

She ran up the two flights of stairs and this time opened Audrey’s door without knocking.

‘Did you get the flowers?’ ‘I’m asleep.’

‘Audrey, did you?’

‘I’m sleep-talking. Go away.’

Gracie’s voice got louder. ‘You promised you’d get them. We made a deal. I’d polish the silver if you got the flowers. You promised.’

‘I forgot.’ Audrey’s voice was muffled by the pillow. ‘That’s not fair!’ Gracie was shouting now.

‘Can you two shut up?’ Charlotte’s voice sounded clearly from her room across the hallway. ‘I’m trying to get some sleep here.’

Gracie surprised them both, and herself, by giving a loud shriek that lasted nearly ten seconds. It hurt her throat but it worked. Before the last note finished sounding, both Audrey (in a silk nightdress) and Charlotte (in plaid pyjamas) were standing in front of her. Their expressions were murderous, but they were at least paying her attention.

‘Bloody hell, Gracie. Shut up. You’ll wake Mum and Dad and Hope,’ Charlotte hissed. ‘You know the rules. No sleepin on Saturdays, no pocket money for any of us.’

Gracie stood her ground. ‘Audrey was supposed to get the flowers and she didn’t.’

Charlotte rolled her eyes. ‘So what? Who cares? If anyone asks, blame it on the maids.’

‘We don’t have maids.’

‘People don’t know that. Tell them we had a maid but she turned out to be light-fingered ‘

‘Flower-fingered,’ Audrey interrupted.

Charlotte laughed. ‘So we had to dismiss her. Hence, no maid and no flowers.’

Gracie wanted to cry. She hated it when her sisters ganged up on her like this. She also hated it when there were no flowers in the rooms. At any other time of the year, she would have gone out into the large gardens surrounding the house and picked what she needed. But there were no flowers at the moment, just lots of dry autumn leaves.

‘Stop fretting so much, Gracie,’ Audrey said, more kindly. ‘It really doesn’t matter.’

‘It matters to me.’

‘It matters to me.’ Charlotte and Audrey both mimicked her passionate tone, before laughing again.

That did it. She stomped, as noisily as she could, down the hallway.

‘Shut up, Gracie. You’ll wake everyone,’ Audrey hissed again. ‘I don’t care. I hope I wake them all, Mum and Dad and Aunt Hope. Then I’ll be able to tell them about the flowers. About your broken promise.’

‘I’m going back to bed,’ Charlotte said, turning away. Gracie turned back towards her. ‘You can’t. You’re supposed to be dressed and ready by now too. I checked the roster. It’s you and me on today. I’m downstairs, you’re upstairs.’