Jean Beazely could name all the cities in Australia she had never visited by heart. And all the countries, and their capitols. Which is to say she could name every major city on a map of the world. She had never visited them, and she missed them all. When Jean was a girl she loved to read. History, romance, mysteries, but above all she loved to read about travel. She loved adventures that took her to the far off corners of the globe. Jean traveled with Allen Quartermain in search of lost worlds in King Solomon's Mines. She reveled in the sweeping feats of Jules Verne stories and never tired of how Philias Fogg had travelled around the world only to realize in his darkest hour that love was his greatest treasure. Jean dreamed of traveling the globe with these adventurers, of discovering treasures of her own. However her mother grew concerned about her bookish ways, admonishing her that boys didn't like girls who read too much or who acted too smart and she took it to heart. By her teenage years Jean had given up books entirely.
It wasn't until she was married with children that she resumed reading again. Trapped on the farm, having gradually watched all her dreams worked into the dust with the seeds, she was desperate for some distraction. On a trip into town she purchased a drug store paperback on a whim. It was awful stuff, a violent novella about the American West, but for a few hours after the boys were in bed it brought her an escape. She started making regular visits to the Ballarat East Library soon after.
Jean had never taken a particular interest in drama. She enjoyed the few plays she had seen but had never thought to be a part of them. It was as a favor to a friend at church that she picked up a script for the first time. One of the cast of the Church Dramatic Society had fallen ill a few weeks before the show opened and they needed a substitute. It was a minor role with only a few lines, an English ambassador in a highly abridged version of Hamlet, but Jean would fit the costume without alteration. Her friend practically begged her to help, so Jean said she would humor her. Suddenly, standing on stage in the background, Jean found she was not just reading the story, she was living it. She found the whole experience intoxicating. She did not care about the audience or the attention, in fact she would have preferred to forgo it if such a thing were allowed in plays, but being in someone else's skin and seeing the world through their eyes was a revelation. Jean knew she wanted to return to this world. However the dream was to be short lived. In the few weeks of rehearsals Christopher had already started to complain that she was away from the farm too long, and the boys naturally had no interest in Shakespeare. After the final curtain call Jean took her bow to an audience of strangers and distance acquaintances, and reluctantly walked away.
Walking away, Jean found, is not the same as forgetting. In all likelihood she would not have been able to continue after Christopher died even if family life had not forced her off the stage. After Christopher was gone keeping her family fed, a roof over their heads, and her children out of trouble became a constant struggle. Boredom was a distant luxury she would have considered herself blessed to endure. She still found time to read with the occasional play making its way onto her reading list. On those rare quiet evenings she would scan the dialogue, picking out which characters to play, silently reciting a few lines to herself. When the boys were grown and had left home and she was settled into a stable routine as the doctor's housekeeper, she was quick to return to the Drama Society. While no one would confuse them for the Union Theatre Repertory Company, she got to escape to other people's lives again, and she took great joy in it.
Considering all of this, Jean found it bitterly ironic that she was walking away again. Previously it was outside circumstances that had kept her away from the theatre, this time it was pressure from within. During rehearsals for "The Importance of Being Ernest," political feuds were spilling over from the real world into the play, straining her relationship with church members she had known for years. Getting even a minor role was a fight. To complicate things, she had attracted the attentions of the kind but milquetoast director of the play. She had seen it coming for a long time, but she was running out of ways to say no without jeopardizing her place in the company. She agonized over him, debating a last chance at married life vs. being confined to a marriage with a man for whom she felt no passion for. So Jean informed him on one difficult afternoon that she would be done with both of them, the director and the Drama Society as a whole. She tried to do it gently but he saw through her excuses. Jean knew he would never understand how much it cost her to reject him. She tried to turn her attention during the rest of the rehearsal period on the role. She focused on the story, the dialogue, the humor, the costumes; she tried to take joy in what little time she had left there.
On what should have been one of her final days with the Drama Society, taking a curtain call while dressed unconvincingly as a young male manservant, she looked out across the stage and found herself wavering. In the front row sat her employer, Lucien Blake, along with their lodger Mattie and her nephew Danny. They were applauding and cheering louder than anyone in the room, despite Jean's minor part. Squinting she could just make them out, but they were impossible not to hear. Suddenly Jean found she had an audience she was never seeking, and it was difficult not to feel like she was where she belonged. She realized that as much as she loved to step inside other characters, playing Jean Beazely had its charms as well. Jean Beazely was not the sort of person who would give up what she loved just because of a few difficulties. The role she played with the Drama Society was far from over.