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 football-sock-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 full-time 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.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
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-dire-need-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 sp
eech, 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.
Soon after arriving in Chicago all those years ago she’d started to keep a diary. Not filled with her thoughts or first impressions, she didn’t have the time for that, but with goals, ideas, hopes. She’d re-read it recently. It entertained and amused her to see how much of it had come true. ‘Be my own boss.’ ‘Be independent and independently wealthy.’ Had she predicted her own future somehow? If she had written ‘Be happily married’, ‘Be in love’, would her dating life have been different? It was the only area of her life that hadn’t worked out so well.
At first there hadn’t been time. Her nanny duties included minding Ethan most evenings and on her one night off she preferred to laze in front of the television eating delicious American cookies rather than head out to Chicago’s bars and clubs with other nannies she’d met. She’d gone on a few blind dates in those early years but they’d been as unsuccessful as the ones she’d tried with her friend Celia in Melbourne. She just didn’t seem to like men her own age. One night, one of her nanny friends had got drunk and announced she had a crush on Charlotte. For a moment Charlotte had wondered whether that was where she’d been going wrong, whether it was women she should be dating, not men. But unfortunately that hadn’t turned out to be the case, either. The more she thought about it, the less interested she was in dating either sex. There was too much going on in her life career-wise. It also didn’t help that she’d seen so many failed relationships. Her own parents, for starters.
In her admittedly limited experience, marriages foundered for one of five reasons – basic incompatibility, money problems, infidelity, boredom, or all of the above. Her parents clearly came under the money problems banner. Severe money problems, from what Gracie had told her. Charlotte knew they had arrived in Australia with debts and it seemed they had left Australia the same way. All her father’s fault too, by the sounds of it. One far-fetched plan after the other, Templeton Hall the straw that broke the camel’s – or the accountant’s – back. None of it surprised Charlotte. As the oldest, she had heard plenty of their fights, even managed to see some of the crisply worded letters from various solicitors during some of her regular secret forays into her father’s office.
At least Henry hadn’t asked her to talk to Mr Giles about a possible bail-out. That would have been too much. Instead, he had seemingly embarked on an international tour of antique hotspots, dealing in everything from clocks to china to furniture in an attempt to raise as much cash as quickly as possible, assuaging his guilt about never seeing his children with a constant onslaught of postcards. Gracie had only ever seen the bright side of their father’s actions, of course. ‘He’s working so hard to try and fix everything, Charlotte,’ she’d written once. ‘He’s been travelling all over England and America. I don’t think there’s an antiques store or an old manor house in the northern hemisphere that he hasn’t visited in the past few years. Poor Dad.’
Poor Dad indeed, Charlotte thought. He’d telephoned her once when he was in Connecticut on a buying trip. ‘You could always visit instead of telephone, Dad. I’m just an airfare away. Your poor abandoned eldest daughter, so far away from home and hearth.’
‘I’d love to, Charlotte, but my time is just not my own this trip. I’ll be back, though.’
If he had come to the Midwest, he hadn’t visited her. Did she care? Sometimes. She had mixed feelings about her father. Perhaps she had done all her emotional-stepping-back from him and her mother when she first went to boarding school all those years ago in Melbourne. Certainly, the news that they had separated didn’t cause her world to tumble down or her heart to break. If anything, she was amazed they had stayed together for so long. They were so obviously ill-suited. Her father was charming, but so unreliable, so easily distracted, chasing one money-making venture after another. Her mother, by contrast, was so serious. Intellectual rather than emotional. The ‘adult’ in the relationship. On the bright side, from the little Charlotte had been able to prise out of her mother over the years, all the debts had now been cleared. Not that it meant her parents were back talking again.
Poor Gracie had been so upset about it all. Charlotte had tried to console her over the phone, trying to explain that it wasn’t Gracie’s fault, that their parents had a relationship quite separate to their roles as parents. She’d tried every approach
she could, but all Gracie had ever wanted was for everyone she knew to be happy and live happily ever after. She had always been so sweet. Too sweet for her own good, possibly.
Perhaps it was no wonder that the accident with Tom and Spencer had upset her so much. Time would heal things for her eventually, Charlotte felt sure. She was only twenty-seven. Plenty of time yet.
Charlotte’s thoughts turned to Spencer. Her brother at least seemed to be making up for everyone else when it came to accumulating notches on his bedpost or however people counted relationships these days. In her opinion he was too much of a chip off their father’s block, all charm and not to be trusted, but there was no denying he was great amusement value, and those hippyish, boyish looks of his certainly seemed to attract girls in droves. The latest, Irish Ciara, sounded very nice on the phone. Nicer than Spencer’s Swedish Anna or Polish Katerina had ever sounded. Ciara also sounded smart. Organised. Charlotte would bet a thousand dollars it was Ciara’s brains that were behind this ridiculous but bafflingly successful Irish surf school, too. Shark Boy, indeed. P. T. Barnum had it right. There was a sucker born every minute, and anyone who fell for Spencer’s tale deserved to be taken for all they had.
And to continue her audit of her family – what about Audrey? Charlotte thought about her sister for a moment, then decided there was nothing worth mulling over. It was a little embarrassing to admit it, but Audrey bored Charlotte. Her complete self-obsession. The whole ‘Greg saved my life’ carry-on. The ‘none of you see me for the artist I am’ business. Yawnsville, Arizona, as one of her nanny students was too fond of saying. The sooner Audrey faced up to the fact that she made her living by sticking her hand up a sock’s kabootie, the better. Enough of the artistic temperament. Save it for the real artists. Not that she would ever say that to Audrey, of course. Knowing her, there’d be every chance she’d lapse back into no-speaking and Charlotte would have to put up with hours of earnest phone conversations with Grig, who seemed perfectly nice, but God, could he get any more boring either? And to think Audrey and Grig between them were in charge of the televisual stimulation of thousands of children around the world. What were they creating, a generation of sock puppet-obsessed zombies? Charlotte had sat through half of one episode of It’s Bobbie Time! during one of her rare visits to London and been appalled at how backward it was, all patronising talk into the camera and ancient songs. Thank God they hadn’t managed to sell Bobbie to any of the US cable networks. That would really have damaged Charlotte’s credibility with her client base.
At Home with the Templetons Page 36