At Home With The Templetons (44 page)

Easily, she realised. She was much happier with Greg than she’d ever been with her family. She thought it best to put it a little differently, however. ‘I’ll be happy wherever you are, and if you’d be happier in New Zealand, I would be too.’

Their flights to Auckland were just a few months off when Gracie, Spencer and Tom had the accident in Italy. It had been so sad. Poor Tom. Poor Gracie too, of course. Audrey could only imagine how guilty she must feel.

At Greg’s urging, Audrey offered to delay the trip to New Zealand, but her mother thankfully insisted she and Greg shouldn’t change their plans. Spencer was already on the mend, Gracie would only recover in her own time and in her own way, her mother told her. There was nothing anyone could do but let time do its work. ‘Go, Audrey. It’s time you lived your own life.’

And so she had. The following month would mark their eighth year here in Auckland. Eight happy years. They had a beautiful house in Ponsonby, all light and glass and close to so many excellent restaurants and art galleries, and an even more beautiful weekend house on Waiheke Island, with its wonderful scenery and boutique vineyards, just a short ferry ride away. They’d talked about having a baby but decided the parenting life really wasn’t for them. They had so much to do with children in their work life, after all. Their wonderful, successful work life. She still sometimes needed to pinch herself about how that had all turned out so wonderfully for her as well. All due to Greg too, of course.

He’d seen the ad in the paper about auditions for a local theatre group six weeks after they arrived. ‘Just try it. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to go again.’ The group were casting for their annual children’s pantomime, that year a mixture of actors and puppets. The catch was the actors had to supply their own puppets and write their own material.

‘What do I know about puppets?’ she wailed that night at home.

‘You just keep it simple and colourful,’ Greg said. ‘Like this, watch.’ There and then, he pulled out a long orange football sock from his chest of drawers, dragged it over his hand and started a funny, playful conversation with it.

‘A sock puppet?’ Audrey said. ‘Are you mad?’

Greg called in their neighbour’s two children as guinea-pig audience members. Self-conscious and giggly in turn, Audrey tried her puppetry skills and different voices out on them. The children were unimpressed. It was only when she pretended the puppet was whispering to her, that only she could hear what it had to say, that she caught their attention.

‘He’s funny,’ one of the kids said. ‘What’s his name?’ ‘The same as yours, actually,’ she said. ‘Bobbie.’

Three weeks, after Audrey’s well-received role in the pantomime came to an end, Greg saw an ad for open auditions for a new TV NZ children’s program. Magicians, performers, puppeteers welcome, it read. They both agreed that footballsock-Bobbie may have been enough for a pantomime, but wouldn’t be enough for a TV show. They had a new puppet made, sock-like in appearance, of better-quality materials but with the same bright-orange body, black button eyes and shock of blue hair. When Audrey was offered a regular presenting spot by the TV producers, as the link person between imported cartoons and advertiser-sponsored competitions, Greg urged her to accept it.

‘It’s not the West End, no, but it’s paid work, it’s fun and you’re great at it. Why don’t

you at least give it a try?’

Now, more than six years later, It’s Bobbie Time! was one of New Zealand’s most popular children’s TV shows, had won a series of educational awards and also been sold to cable TV networks in Australia, Singapore, Denmark and parts of Latin America. The show had not just made her mildly famous in New Zealand. It had made her and Greg wealthy. While Audrey’s personal contract was with the TV station, she had, by luck rather than design, retained the copyright to any merchandise relating to the Bobbie puppet. In the previous three years, the range had expanded to include Bobbie toys, lunchboxes, raincoats, jigsaw puzzles, board games, drink bottles and even Bobbie toothbrushes. Greg had given up his therapy work and was now the fulltime manager of Bobbie Enterprises.

‘Saint Greg,’ Charlotte called him, though she and Spencer found it more pathetically amusing to call him Saint Grig, in exaggerated New Zealand accents. If they weren’t laughing at Greg’s accent, they laughed at Audrey’s job.

‘Has Peter Jackson rung about the next Lord of the Rings film yet?’ Spencer had said last time she was home on a brief visit. ‘I can just see it, The Bobbit.’

‘The stage is Bobbie’s first love, surely?’ Charlotte said. ‘I can just imagine him playing Hamlet. “To Bobbie or not to Bobbie, that is the question.”’

The pair of them had practically screamed laughing.

Audrey was on the phone to Greg in tears for a long time that night. She’d been so excited about sharing all the details of her life in New Zealand. She’d even bought DVDs of It’s Bobbie Time! to show them. They’d barely watched ten minutes of it. ‘Ignore them,’ he’d said. ‘They’re just jealous.’ ‘They’re not jealous. They’re mean.’

Eleanor had seemed the most interested in her stories, but she was distracted, Audrey could tell. Hope wasn’t to blame for once, either. Her aunt had been sober for years by that time. The more Audrey thought about it, the more she realised her mother had always been distracted. One of the therapists she’d gone to during her ‘bad time’, as she referred to her period of non-talking, had tried to press her on her relationship with her mother. Audrey had thought it was all right between them, but maybe it hadn’t been?

At least Gracie had seemed to care. ‘My sister the television star!’ she said when she met her at Heathrow on one of her visits home. She told Audrey she thought Bobbie was lovely, that it was fantastic that she had found her niche, that children’s television was a really valuable form of entertainment, helping form young minds, stimulate their imaginations. If anything, Audrey thought Gracie had laid it all on a bit thick. As if she was playing a part of the interested sister, but not really meaning it.

Gracie had been between jobs at that time, Audrey remembered now. Greg wondered whether Gracie’s employment record had something to do with the accident, whether it had perhaps caused a kind of guilt-induced trauma, making it difficult for her to settle to any one job or interest. Audrey had explained to him that Gracie had been like that since she was a child, racing from idea to idea, activity to activity, endlessly enthusiastic. But the accident had changed her, Audrey thought. Made her more serious. Sadder. Not that Audrey had ever dared to bring up the subject of Tom with Gracie. At first, because her mother had warned her that it was too distressing for Gracie; that she was already tormenting herself with guilt. Audrey had then decided that if Gracie wanted to talk about Tom, she would raise the subject herself. So far, to her relief, Gracie hadn’t.

Audrey would never have said it aloud, even to Greg, but she was glad to have thousands of kilometres between her family and her new life. Perhaps they felt the same way about her. None of them had bothered to make the trip out to New Zealand, after all. There was still the often repeated charade by her father that they would all go back to Templeton Hall one day and he and the others would stop over in New Zealand on the way, but Audrey had no faith in that day ever coming. It had always looked unlikely enough as it was, even more so once their parents separated. But after the accident with Tom, when Nina had moved out so abruptly, well, who knew what kind of condition it might be in these days?

Audrey often dreaded getting one of the kinds of calls Nina must have had, news that something had happened to someone in her family and they needed her to return to England immediately. Especially at a time like now, when she was so busy with Bobbie. That was one positive thing about Charlotte’s message at least, she thought. If it had been bad news about her parents, surely Charlotte would have told her, not just left a Missed Call message? She tried the number again now. Straight to voicemail. With a sigh, Audrey left another message.

‘Charlotte, it’s me. Can you try me again? But not too late. I need an early night.’ She thought that might not sound very nice. ‘I hope everything’s all right,’ she added. Then she went outside to happily wait for Greg.

Chicago, Illinois, USA

The tall, slender, immaculately groomed young woman stood with perfect posture in front of the microphone, speaking slowly and clearly to the one hundred-and-fifty people gathered before her in the sophisticated lakeside hotel’s main conference room.

‘Thank you all so much, once again for choosing Templeton Nannies for your training, for putting your future in our hands, and more importantly, the future of your charges in our hands, the children who will shape our future. It is now my great honour to call upon our founder, Charlotte Templeton, to present your graduation certificates.’

Charlotte rose from her seat in the centre of the podium, smoothed the too-tight skirt of her size XL navy-blue suit over her unfortunately ever-expanding thighs, waited a moment for the applause to die down and then made her way to the

microphone. She turned to her assistant, Dana, nodded her thanks, wished silently to herself that her assistant didn’t look so much like an after-Weight-Watchers ad compared to her own in-direneed-of-Weight-Watchers figure, and then turned towards the audience. She waited one second, two, three, all the way to ten before she spoke again. It was a trick she’d learnt years before at a public-speaking course and had used to great effect ever since.

‘Thank you, Dana,’ she said, in her deliberately maintained English accent, ‘for that gracious introduction, but the truth of today’s ceremony is that the honour is all mine. To be here today, to see my latest graduates as they prepare to take their step out into the world, is not just a moving experience for me. It is a moment of fulfilment. Today marks the culmination of months of hard work and dedication, the coming together of ambition, intelligence, compassion and just as importantly, a sense of fun - all the ingredients that make up the finest nannies in America, the Templeton Nannies. Today, my dear graduates, as I stand here looking out proudly at you …’

As she continued her speech, Charlotte’s mind drifted towards thoughts of that night’s dinner, about phone calls she needed to make and a forthcoming interview she was doing with

a leading parenting magazine. She’d given speeches like this four times a year for the past eight years, adding just a few new sentences each time to keep herself entertained. Apart from that, it was an autopilot performance. Oh, she meant it all, of course she did. She didn’t have to feign sincerity. When she talked about Templeton Nannies being the number-one nanny agency in the Midwest, she was telling the truth. She’d worked hard to claim that position. But these days she was just the figurehead. As her dear friend and mentor Mr Giles had told her many times over the years, the higher you rose in your business, the less you had to do. ‘If you do it right, if you surround yourself with the right people, they do all your work for you.’

She tuned back in completely again as she reached the final, inspirational lines of her speech (‘You leave me today in body, but I will always be with you in spirit’) and turned once more towards her assistant as she stepped forward with a tray of graduation certificates. Charlotte was happy to stay fully in the moment, as the saying had it, during this part. She did always find it somewhat miraculous that the fifteen or twenty - or in today’s case, twenty-five - graduates now stepping one by one up onto the stage could have changed so much from the sloppy, laidback students who had signed with her four months earlier.

‘You’re more like a finishing school than a nanny agency,’ one of the parents had said to her once. ‘I hardly recognise my daughter. You’ve worked miracles.’

‘And in turn your daughter will work miracles on the children in her care,’ Charlotte said. Sometimes she nearly made herself sick with her saccharine statements but it was what people wanted to hear. When it came to other people’s children, either the trainee nannies or the children of her clients, she could never be too sincere, too concerned. And she did mean what she said. Most of the time.

‘Don’t get too cynical,’ Mr Giles had warned her during one of their monthly catch-ups. She’d been telling him about one of her clients, the airhead mother of a frankly dense four-year old. Charlotte had turned their first encounter into what she felt was a very amusing anecdote. ‘Don’t get too big for your boots, Charlotte,’ Mr Giles said. ‘Yes, you probably are smarter and funnier than many people you’ll meet in life, but it doesn’t mean you have to laugh at them. Show them respect and they will show you respect.’

If anyone else said that to her, there would have been war. No one spoke to Charlotte Templeton like that. No one but Mr Giles, that was. They’d had an honest, straightforward relationship from the start. He’d recognised something in her that he needed for his son. She’d seen in him a chance to escape, and to learn. It was a gamble but it had worked for them both. She still called him Mr Giles too, even all these years later. It was almost a pet name now. His son, Ethan, her first charge and in many ways the person who had changed her life, was now twenty-four and if she did say so herself, a model citizen. He’d moved smoothly from private school to Ivy League university to postgraduate study and was now working as an architect in New York. They were still great friends, the age difference scarcely a factor. She’d had dinner and gone to a Broadway show with Ethan and his girlfriend only two weeks earlier and it had been a wonderful night. She’d never have thought it possible, but he’d turned from her little fun client into a good teenage boy, and now an even nicer adult. It could have been so different. He could have been a spoilt brat, someone she went running from, shrieking in horror, only weeks after arriving in Chicago. Mr Giles could have turned into a lecherous old man. It was what everyone had expected, she knew that, but it hadn’t happened.