At Home with the Templetons Page 4

  ‘But this is terrible!’ Spencer’s dad had said. ‘Someone must have substituted a fake. The one that was there was certified by experts. I have the certificate somewhere. It’s registered with Sotheby’s. You’re telling me it’s a fake?’

  ‘It’s worthless,’ the man said. Spencer remembered him having quite red cheeks, as if he had run a race. ‘You’ve had a thief in the house. And if you don’t mind me saying, your whole approach here is very risky and opens you up to exactly this kind of crime.’

  ‘But if we can’t trust people in our home, where can we trust them?’ his dad had said.

  Since that day, any time any visitor announced they were an expert on something, or questioned an item’s authenticity, there was a ‘new rule of behaviour’ to observe. They were to thank and congratulate the person, ‘quietly and firmly’, their father said, for noticing, and also ask them to keep the news to themselves. They were right, it was a copy. They had been advised by their insurers and the local police that they’d been too relaxed about displaying treasured family heirlooms. So ‘regrettably’ (it had taken Spencer a few attempts to pronounce that word) the family was forced to lock away the most valuable items, and put nearly identical but less valuable copies in their place.

  ‘You shouldn’t say it’s original, then,’ a man said to Charlotte one afternoon, when Spencer was under the piano, listening. The man was cross about Charlotte telling his group that a painting over the fireplace in the drawing room was an original Gainsborough from the 1780s, commissioned by a member of the Templeton family. Charlotte had followed her father’s directions to the letter, gently drawing the man aside and explaining that there was an original in a bank safe in Castlemaine but in the interests of protecting the family’s assets, this copy had been hung in its place.

  ‘That’s false advertising, then. We paid good money for this tour and your brochure says all the interior decorations are authentic to the period.’

  ‘And so they are,’ Charlotte said. ‘This copy is from the 1860s. Thieves didn’t just appear this century, you know. Our great-great-grandfather in Yorkshire had this copy made after coming home from a shooting party and disturbing a thief about to cut the original from its frame. In many ways, it’s almost as valuable, don’t you think?’

  Spencer asked her about it afterwards. He didn’t remember his father telling him that story. Charlotte just laughed. ‘Of course it’s not true, Spencer. What do I know about nineteenth-century forgery practices? Remember Dad’s second golden rule? If in doubt, make it up. Do it quickly and then move on.’

  It was a lesson Spencer had taken to heart. He’d got away with it too, so far. His Aunt Hope had listened in one afternoon, standing in a corner of the room in that creepy way she did sometimes, hardly moving or even blinking. Her zombie mood, Spencer called it. He toned down his stories that day, but he probably needn’t have bothered. Hope just stood there for a while, doing that thing where she scratched her arm over and over before wandering out again. He’d thought about saying something funny about her being the house’s resident ghost but then his mother had come in and he was glad he hadn’t. His mum got very fierce very quickly if any of them said anything about Hope.

  Still, he didn’t have to worry about doing the tours now for another week. He had his own projects to work on instead. The stink bomb had just been a practice run, but amazingly easy. Coming up next, just as soon as he’d saved up enough to buy all the ingredients he needed, would be the very best project of all.

  He created a new list in his head. Future Good Things.

  The fire-spewing volcano was top of the list.

  In her room, Hope was trying to make the inch of wine in her glass last as long as possible. The bottle on the floor beside her was empty. How could that be, she wondered, staring at it. It must have been half empty when she got it out of her wardrobe. She couldn’t have drunk it all already, surely?

  She took a small sip. Then another. Another. All tiny ones but as quickly as possible, trying to relax, trying to calm herself, trying to stop checking the door every two minutes to make sure no one was about to come bursting in. She hadn’t meant to cause a fuss today, she truly hadn’t, but when the police car turned up and she saw Gracie being carried in, she’d thought the worst, thought that Gracie had been killed. Even when she learnt the truth, that it was just a minor accident, it was too late, her nerves were jangling, the anxiety had set in, the tears too …

  Not that anyone understood, Eleanor especially, trying to shush her, saying that Gracie’s accident had nothing to do with her. But of course it did. She knew what they were all saying. If Hope hadn’t been there, causing problems, the Hall would be running like clockwork, the vases would have been filled with flowers and Gracie wouldn’t have had to drive into town. Did they think she didn’t know what they were all thinking about her? Even as she’d tried to apologise for her tears, for getting so upset, even though she’d slipped away as quickly as she could back to her room, their voices had stayed with her. She’d sat on her bed for five minutes, telling herself that of course she could get through this without a drink, she just needed to calm down, to think of something else, all the things she’d been taught in different consulting rooms over the years. But her own voice wasn’t strong enough. That other louder, stronger, nicer voice inside her started talking. She liked what it had to say. One drink wouldn’t hurt, would it? It would take the edge off everything, make everything feel better, wouldn’t it?

  And it did. It always did. It just didn’t last, that was the problem. It was a big, big problem, she thought, gazing again at the empty glass in her hand. Why did people make wine bottles so small? Why didn’t someone invent an alcohol patch like a nicotine patch? Some sort of hidden device, like a morphine drip, that would keep a nice steady supply of alcohol drip-dripping into her vein, keep her nice and steady all day long, without anyone needing to know? She glanced over at the wardrobe, knowing she had another full bottle hidden behind her winter coats. No, she wouldn’t get it. She’d be strong. She didn’t need it. It wasn’t good to mix her medication with alcohol. Besides, the way her luck was going lately, Eleanor would walk in just as she’d taken out the cork and there’d only be another lecture, another reminder of how awful it had been that time Eleanor had found her on the floor of her London flat.

  ‘I thought you were dead, Hope. I thought you’d killed yourself. Can you even try to imagine how I felt?’

  ‘How you felt? It wasn’t exactly fun having my stomach pumped out.’

  She’d been trying to be funny, but of course Eleanor had got all high and mighty again. No sense of humour. She’d never had one. Anyway, for heaven’s sake, why did she have to keep going on about that day? So she’d happened to drop round just in time. What did she want, a medal? Where was her Good Samaritan spirit? They were sisters, weren’t they? Family? She would help Eleanor if she ever needed it, of course she would. If Eleanor ever stopped being so bloody perfect and showed some vulnerability or understanding once in a blue moon … Anyway, why was there such a fuss about her choosing to dull her pain with the occasional drink? Eleanor should be glad it was only alcohol and a few tablets. What if it had been heroin or another class-A drug?

  ‘It’s just wine, Eleanor,’ she’d said to her last time Eleanor had started on one of her tedious lectures. ‘It’s legal, isn’t it?’

  Even now, Hope could hear Eleanor’s voice, at her, at her, all the time, like a bloody machine gun. I’m begging you, Hope, please don’t do this to yourself again. Please Hope, don’t drink any more. Please, Hope, don’t mix alcohol and tablets like that. Please Hope, don’t make a fuss. Please, Hope, change everything about yourself. Please, Hope, try to be as good and saintly and married and motherly as me …

  Oh, please, Eleanor, shut up and mind your own fu—. Just in time, Hope realised she was talking out loud.

  It was all right for Eleanor, of course. It had always been all right for Eleanor. Always gone so perfectly: marriage,
babies, career satisfaction. But had she ever shown her own sister any sympathy? No, of course not. Had she cared when Hope’s heart had been broken, time and time again? Understood how she’d felt that time she thought she was pregnant, and the father had said he didn’t want to know? So what if she’d been mistaken, that her period had just been late? Eleanor had shown her true colours that day, going on and on about her own problems, the children being unwell or something boring like that, actually saying to Hope that she ‘didn’t have time for this right now’. No time for her own sister’s heartache and pain.

  Hope stood up. Damn it. Damn her and damn all of them. She wanted a drink, so why couldn’t she just have a drink? Who were they, any of them, to tell her how to live her life? Her life. The life she had given up for them. Hadn’t she flown all the way across the world to give them a hand with this ridiculous Hall? Hadn’t she spent hundreds, maybe even thousands, of unpaid hours helping Henry to design and plant the garden? Had Eleanor or Henry ever thanked her? No. Never. Too busy, all the time. Too busy loving each other, being so happily married all the time. As for the children. No gratitude from them either, ever. That brat Charlotte was the worst of them, the arrogant little cow. What she needed was a good kick up the … As for Audrey – had there ever been a more self-obsessed child in the world? The way she wafted around the house as if she was the bloody Lady in the Lake, it would make you sick. And Gracie? Well, all right, Gracie could be sweet, but if she didn’t watch herself she’d end up too sweet. Thank God for Spencer. At least he had a bit of spirit. More to the point, thank God for that little arrangement she had with Spencer …

  The empty wine glass was annoying her now. Really annoying her. So was the empty wine bottle. Swaying only slightly, she tiptoed across the room to her wardrobe. It was so childish. So embarrassing. At her age, still hiding bottles as if she was back in boarding school. While downstairs she could just picture them all, Henry especially, pontificating, helping himself to another whisky, then another. What was the difference? Seriously, what was the difference between him having too many drinks and her drinking, every night? ‘But, Hope, I don’t need to drink. I can stop any time I like.’ Oh, shut up, Henry, and you shut up too, Eleanor. She realised she’d shouted that and waited, poised at the wardrobe door, for movement in the hall. Nothing. Good.

  Stuff it. She would have another drink. She’d never get to sleep now without it. Just a small one. Just to get her to sleep. As she opened the wardrobe door, she was smiling.

  In their bedroom, Henry and Eleanor were fighting. Eleanor had come in from saying goodnight to Gracie to find Henry already in bed, reading a newly arrived copy of Antiques Australia.

  ‘I thought you were going to do the accounts tonight?’ Eleanor said.

  ‘Too tired, I decided. No point doing them when I’m not at my best.’

  ‘You haven’t been at your best for the past two months, then? Longer? Henry, this is getting serious.’

  ‘Eleanor,’ he said her name in a mocking tone, ‘your problem is you think everything is serious.’

  ‘No, my problem is I’m starting to think I am the only one in this house, in this family, who takes our problems seriously. You do nothing but stick your head in the sand.’

  ‘I’ll do them when I’m feeling up to it.’

  She snatched the magazine away from him. ‘And when will that be, Henry? When the house falls down around our ears because we can’t afford the most basic of repairs? When the visitor numbers dwindle to zero because you haven’t felt like advertising or because you’re too busy doing your family tree or entertaining yourself rather than anyone who happens to stumble upon us? Have you checked the bank statements lately? The money from that silverware sale is practically gone and you know the electricity bill is due any day. You’re not even trying any more, are you? Do you think all the vases and those chairs you were so thrilled to find are going to sell themselves?’

  ‘I think I preferred it when you were in awe of me. The sweet little Eleanor I met twenty years ago would never have talked to me like this.’

  ‘Don’t patronise me, Henry.’

  ‘I’m not patronising you. I’m telling the truth. You were much easier to handle back then. Darling, you’re just tired. Upset about Gracie.’

  ‘Yes, I’m tired. Yes, I’m upset about Gracie. But I am also completely and utterly tired and upset with you. How many more excuses, Henry? Do you know what Gracie’s just asked me in there? Why people call us the mad bloody Templetons. Why we think we own the place.’

  ‘We do. Well, most of it. I think the bank might have an interest in the stable roof.’

  ‘It’s not a joke, Henry. I’m not joking.’

  ‘No, Eleanor, but you are shouting and I don’t want you to wake the children any more than you do. You’re tired, I’m tired, it’s been a busy day. Come here. Come here and let me give you a kiss.’

  ‘I don’t want a kiss. I want you to fix everything you promised you’d fix and haven’t. I want you to bring in more money. I want you to do all the accounts you said you’d do months ago. I want Charlotte to start behaving, I want Audrey to stop all this acting nonsense, I want Gracie to stop being so anxious and earnest about everything, I want Spencer to stop plotting to blow us all up.’ She was now somewhere between laughter and tears, even as Henry patted the bed beside him, reached for her and drew her closer. ‘I want a normal family life, Henry. Is that too much to ask?’

  ‘Yes, darling. I’m sorry, but it is.’ He held her closely as she gave in to the tears. ‘That’s not all, though, is it?’

  She didn’t raise her head from his shoulder but she shook her head. He stroked her back, her hair, held her tighter. Her words were muffled and he had to ask her to repeat them. She lifted her head and looked him straight in the eye.

  ‘I want Hope to go. I want her to leave me alone. Leave all of us alone. She’s ruining our lives. She tried to do it in England and nearly succeeded and she’s trying to do it again.’

  ‘She can’t help it, Eleanor. She’s not well.’

  She shook his hands off her at the same time she shook her head against his words. ‘I don’t care, Henry. I don’t care any more. I just want her to go.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  Four days after Gracie’s accident, in the kitchen of a farmhouse three paddocks away from Templeton Hall, thirty-five-year-old Nina Donovan was reading the local weekly newspaper. A large headline dominated the front page: UNDERAGE DRIVER WREAKS HAVOC.

  Nina already knew all about it. She’d got the first call only minutes after the crash, as she came in from dropping her twelve-year-old son, Tom, to his junior cricket match, her head filled with the work she needed to finish, despite it being a Saturday. As a freelance illustrator, her income and reputation depended as much on her meeting her deadlines as her artistic talent. The caller was one of the school mums, breathless with excitement as she described the little girl in costume; the crash; the policeman.

  ‘That family will do anything for attention, won’t they?’ the woman said as she finished her account. ‘The reporter from the local paper was there just now too, taking photos – exactly what they’d want.’

  Another day Nina might have agreed with her friend, settled in for a spot of Templeton-criticising, but she wasn’t in the mood today. She surprised herself by defending them. ‘You really think they’d get a little kid to crash a car to get some publicity?’

  ‘They’ve done that sort of thing before,’ her friend said, her tone huffy at Nina’s refusal to play the game. Nina had found an excuse to hang up soon after.

  It was a funny thing, Nina thought, as she finished reading the newspaper article now. Just because she was the Templeton family’s closest neighbour, people assumed she either wanted to hear every bit of gossip about them, or already knew it. The truth was, she knew as much about the Templetons as anyone else in the area. She was happy to keep it that way. After what happened when she made the mistake of going to their first fete two
years earlier, she’d deliberately kept her distance.

  She’d heard talk of them long before the fete, of course. She’d even been taken to see Templeton Hall when she first moved to the goldfields area nearly three years previously, more than a year before the Templetons’ arrival. Not that it had been called Templeton Hall then. The real estate agent showing her rental properties had been proud of the area’s oldest colonial property. ‘Eighteen rooms, including eight bedrooms, three bathrooms, a huge kitchen and a three-acre garden. A bit big for you, perhaps?’ A bit beyond her budget, perhaps, she’d said wryly. It wasn’t available anyway, he told her. ‘It’s in a family trust of some sort. We’ve been waiting for a duke or duchess to arrive on a private Lear jet to claim their inheritance.’

  It wasn’t royalty or a Lear jet, it turned out. It was the Templetons, a family of six or possibly seven, newly arrived from England. They were the talk of the town whenever Nina went shopping. ‘It’s taken lawyers years to track them down, apparently.’ ‘They’re spending a fortune on the renovations.’ ‘You must have seen them, Nina, surely?’

  But she hadn’t. Oh, she possibly could have if she’d re-routed her daily walk to go up their long driveway, walk across the extensive front garden and peer in one of the house’s twenty or so windows, but she chose not to. She’d been the focus of enough gossip herself over the years to know it was no fun being under scrutiny. Good luck to the Templetons, that’s what she thought. They sounded like a perfectly nice family.

  ‘They sound like weirdos,’ the man in the post office insisted.

  Three months after their sudden arrival, the Templetons held a fete. They placed ads in the local paper. Flyers appeared stuck to the outside of shop windows early one morning. One of the children had been involved, the shopkeepers guessed. Most of the leaflets were glued at a child’s eye level. All the neighbours within a fifty-kilometre radius of the old house found leaflets pushed under their doors as well, Nina included. Everyone insisted they hadn’t heard anyone come to the door, that the dogs hadn’t even barked. One child at Tom’s school, overhearing his mother talking about the silent overnight leaflet drop, decided there were supernatural elements at work. The Templetons were ghosts, he announced, living in a haunted house. He did a great job convincing nearly all of his classmates of the fact. It didn’t seem to matter what any of the parents said after that. The Templetons weren’t just odd, weren’t just foreign, weren’t just mad to attempt to renovate that old house, they were also creatures from the underworld.