by Emma Rous
“That’s where she works.” He keeps his grip on the paper for a moment as I try to take it. “Is she in trouble again?”
I shake my head. “No, not at all.”
He grunts. “Tell her to ring her mum, yeah?”
“I will. Thanks.”
As soon as he lets go, I fold the paper into my damp palm and hurry away.
The address takes me to a gray three-story office building on a street in northeast London, and a parking space comes free just as I approach, as if reassuring me that my visit is within the bounds of reasonable behavior. Once parked, I clamber into the back seat, and my tinted rear windows let me peer into the reception area without being seen.
I study the receptionist. She springs off her stool behind her high desk to fetch some papers, and I’m convinced she’s not Laura—she’s not tall enough, not old enough. A dusty pavement lies between us, as well as three shallow steps and a pair of tall glass doors that slide open and shut periodically as people enter and leave. I stroke the curved corner of my phone with my thumb, silently rehearsing what I plan to say to Laura: My name is Seraphine Mayes. You used to be my brother Edwin’s au pair. Our father just died . . . I squeeze my eyes shut against the threat of tears. I’m feeling less capable of this by the second.
The first few tinny notes of an ice cream van float down from the park at the far end of the street, and an image of my brothers rises in my mind: both tall men, with the sort of open, friendly faces that people warm to instantly. For a moment I wallow in a sensation of separateness, of being different to them, of being disconnected from everyone. I grind my teeth. This is my chance to find out what happened back at the start, on that day we were born. No one else has ever been willing to tell me the details. But Laura might.
I realize I want to see Laura first. I want to see what she looks like before I approach her, before I ask her the question that might change everything.
I ease out of my car and head away down the street before looping around to approach the office building from the direction of the park. A cloud of cool air embraces me as I enter.
“How can I help?” the receptionist asks, her eyebrows rising into pointy arches.
“I have a delivery for Laura Silveira,” I say.
A young man leaning on the desk looks sideways at me, and the receptionist’s gaze drops to my hands.
“Where is it?” she asks.
I curl my fingers. “In the van. She needs to come and check it first. We’ll bring it in if she wants it.”
The receptionist exchanges a glance with the young man, who coughs into his hand.
“What is it, then, top secret?” she asks.
I step right up to the desk, summoning my grandmother’s iciest expression.
“Are you going to call her down, or do you want me to go back to the depot and have my boss ring your boss?” I tap my nails on the smooth counter. The receptionist settles back in her chair slightly.
“Sure. I’ll call her. And you’re from—?”
“I’ll wait outside,” I say.
I march through the glass doors and down the steps, turning left, restraining my gait to a fast walk until I’m confident I’m out of their sight. Then I cross the road and loop back, pulling my hair loose from its bun and shielding my face as I duck through the slow traffic to dive into the back of my car. I scoot across to peer through the window.
The elevator doors open, but it’s a gray-haired man in a shirt and tie coming out, calling something to the receptionist. My dress sticks to my skin. I wait.
The elevator doors open again, and this time it’s a woman. Tall. Broad shouldered. Easily mid-forties. Her dark hair is tied back at the nape of her neck, and she wears black trousers and a shapeless cream blouse, flat black shoes. Her gait as she walks toward the desk seems heavy, although she’s barely overweight. I can’t be certain she’s the same person as the fresh-faced au pair in our family photo album, but it’s possible.
The receptionist says something to her, and she turns and looks sharply through the glass toward the casual shoppers strolling along the pavement, and the row of parked cars within which I’m hidden. I shrink down in my seat behind my tinted glass, half closing my eyes. She steps closer, and the doors slide back, and now she’s standing two meters away, scanning left and right, frowning. There are no vans in sight. Behind her, the receptionist says something to her lanky companion, and he smirks. My nostrils flare.
I study the woman through the brush of my eyelashes. No visible makeup. Strands of gray along her parting. Two vertical frown lines between her eyes. A silver locket hangs around her neck, but there are no rings on her fingers.
She ventures down the steps to look as far as she can along the street in each direction, and her scowl gives way to something more wary. Before I have had enough of scrutinizing her, she whips round and stalks back into the building, back to the elevator without even glancing toward the pair at the desk. I uncurl and rub the fingernail crescents from my palms.
I have found Laura.
Now that I know what she looks like, when she comes out again, I’ll be able to catch her and introduce myself. I tie my hair back up, keeping my gaze fixed on the building. As one o’clock approaches, employees emerge from the elevator and spill out onto the street, peeling off cardigans and jackets as they squint up at the sky, pulling phones from bags and pockets. Laura doesn’t reappear. Eventually I clamber into the driver’s seat and turn on the air-conditioning. I can wait.
If I were in Edwin’s car now, I would find a spare bottle of water and emergency cereal bars in the glove compartment. If Danny were here, there’s no way he’d be able to sit and wait without nipping off to buy some chips. I watch a woman saunter along the pavement, sipping from a take-out coffee cup, and my stomach shrivels. I ease my shoes off and angle my feet into the sluggish drafts from the air vents.
She’ll have to come out eventually.
I think of my own colleagues in Norwich—eating their sandwiches in the cathedral grounds under this same cloudless sky, sharing the usual jokes after a steady morning managing the recruitment company accounts. I miss the soothing routine of my accounting job: the reliability of the numbers, the clear-cut answers. I don’t suppose my boss imagines this is how I’m spending my compassionate leave.
I tug the family photo from my bag and peer at the baby again. I know I was the bigger twin when we were born—amusing, since Danny now towers over me—but I can’t judge the size of this cocooned infant. Edwin’s grin makes my throat tighten: four years old and oblivious to the fact that this was the last day he would ever spend with his mother. Our mother. When I think about her, I picture my heart sending out tentacles, like wriggling strawberry laces, straining to latch on to an emotion. They don’t succeed. Her absence left a hollow space inside me.
Laura’s reappearance jolts me from my thoughts.
She strides from the elevator, and within seconds is out on the pavement, sweeping past me, marching toward the park. I slip my shoes back on and ease out of the car to follow her. She glances back over her shoulder once, just before she turns into the park, but by the time I reach the gate half a minute later, she’s vanished.
A path bisects the expanse of grass, and people lounge around, finishing picnics on either side, but Laura is nowhere in sight. There’s a second gate farther along the boundary with the street. I set off toward it, keeping to the narrow band of shade by the hedge as my eyes seek out potential hiding places: Behind the bandstand? Among those trees?
Back out in the fume-filled street I still can’t see her. I rub the back of my neck. Across the road is a small newsagent, and while I queue to pay for a bottle of water, I continue to scan the pavement outside. A hand on my bare arm makes me flinch.
“You dropped this,” a woman in a head scarf says to me, holding out a coin and ducking away from my expression.
&nb
sp; The photo, the one with my mother in it, still lies on the passenger seat of my car when I return, and I drop into the driver’s seat and turn the picture facedown. I thought I was being so clever, but I’ve messed it all up. I start the engine and sit for a moment, gripping the steering wheel, an uneasy thought prickling underneath my frustration. If I contact Laura properly now—ring her, ask to meet her—will she guess it was me who called her down for a nonexistent delivery today? Did she spot me trying to follow her? Will she ever agree to talk to me now?
Twenty-one days since my father’s accident; nine days since his funeral. I can’t make any decisions sitting in my roasting car on this tired, dusty street. I wipe my palms on my dress and tap Summerbourne into the GPS. I’ll be able to think about it all more clearly when I get home.
2
Laura
August 1991
GREENGAGES. I ALWAYS associated my first visit to Summerbourne with those shy green plums, whose ordinary-looking skins hide such astonishing sweetness. In my eighteen years as a city girl, I had never even seen a greengage, but they grew abundantly in the woodland at the back of the Summerbourne garden, and I devoured several that day. They tasted of honey and sunshine and new beginnings.
The full English breakfast at King’s Cross station earlier that morning had settled my nerves for a while, but as midday drew near and the train rumbled deeper into the Norfolk countryside, the fluttering under my rib cage increased. I pressed my forehead against the window. Broad, flat fields stretched to the horizon, punctuated by eerily motionless villages and odd isolated houses topped with thatch. Somewhere in the depths of my handbag lurked a cheese sandwich intended for this section of the journey, but the upcoming interview had chased away my appetite.
At King’s Lynn, I clutched the letter from Mrs. Mayes in front of me as I approached the taxi rank, even though the address for Summerbourne House was already fixed in my memory in its spiky letters. The taxi driver’s vowels rolled and stretched in his mouth, leaving a heartbeat’s delay before they settled into words I could understand. I fumbled the letter across to him.
“Oh, Summerbourne, is it?” he said. I climbed into the back.
Despite the roads having only one lane in either direction, we hurtled along between high hedges as if he had a sixth sense for hazards around bends.
“That’s just down the drift here,” he said eventually, his tone encouraging, as we left yet another village behind us and swung into a narrow lane. I wound my window down, unsure whether my churning stomach was a reaction to the twisting roads, the looming interview, or the sudden fear that I didn’t have enough money in my wallet to pay him. A heavy, sweet smell filled the car as we passed a field of cows, and the lane curved to reveal a row of small cottages with low front doors, their walls studded with irregular gray stones. Just as I became convinced the lane was narrowing into a dead end, we reached a sign for “Summerbourne” inviting us to turn right. The driveway widened into an oval of golden gravel in front of the most entrancing house I had ever seen.
From the buttery glow of its weathered bricks to the rounded edges of its broad stone doorstep, every detail of Summerbourne radiated a warm welcome. Lush greenery stretched along the front of the house on either side of the central front door, glossy leaves stroking the ground-floor windowsills. The front door knocker was a large brass ring, solid and plain. There was none of the adornment I had seen on grand London houses, but this only enhanced the impression that Summerbourne sat contentedly in its own bricks and mortar.
A long single-story wing stretched from one side of the house, angled backward, its sharper corners hinting at more recent origins. From the far end of this wing a high wall curved to join a stable block that stood at right angles to the main house, fronting onto the oval of gravel. Three of the four stable doorways were fitted with wooden garage doors.
I forgot my anxiety as I stood by the taxi and absorbed the view, and my smile must have revealed my genuine delight to the small, dark-haired woman who emerged from the front door.
“Mrs. Mayes?” I asked.
“Call me Ruth,” she said, and paid the taxi driver without fuss. She had an unhurried manner about her—friendly, but as if part of her attention was elsewhere. A little boy had followed her out and peered at me from behind her legs as the taxi purred away down the lane. This child was the reason I had traveled all this way, and I crouched on the gravel in front of him.
“Hello. I’m Laura. Are you Edwin?”
He nodded. “Did you come on the train?”
“I did.” I tugged my handbag open and rummaged through the contents. “Look—here’s my ticket. Would you like it?”
I wasn’t particularly used to young children, and I’d never seen anyone’s mood change so quickly. He snatched the ticket and whirled around, whooping, waving it in the air, before catching Ruth’s eyes and pausing to say, “Thank you.” Then he launched into a garbled story about a train journey he had taken with his granny—what the guard had said, how fast they’d traveled, what all the different carriages had been for.
Ruth smiled at me over his head. “Let’s show you around.” She indicated the single-story extension as we approached the front door of the house. “That’s the day nursery, there, and the annex at the end of it. We’ll start in there.”
She led me from the hall, through the kitchen and utility room, into the vast, light-filled day nursery that made up the majority of the extension. A row of floor-to-ceiling windows looked out over a wide lawn that ended in trees in the distance. I tore my gaze from the scene and hurried to catch up with Ruth and Edwin as they paused at the door at the far end of the room.
“The annex,” Ruth said, pushing the door open and gesturing me in first. “Did the agency explain the hours? We just want some part-time childcare. We’re quite flexible. The other girl I interviewed thought we were too far out in the middle of nowhere.” She sighed. “We’ve never had an au pair before.”
I looked around at the high ceilings, the white walls, the generous windows.
“I’ve never been an au pair before,” I said, and then gritted my teeth as I realized this reply was hardly reassuring. Ruth didn’t appear to notice.
Edwin slipped his hand into mine. “I’ll show you everything, Missus Laura Silvey. There’s a bed in the bedroom, and there was a ginormous spider in the bathroom, but it’s gone to live in the woods now.”
The furniture was heavy looking and old, but the rooms were bright and spotlessly clean, and I was glad of Edwin’s nonstop chatter as he showed me around. I was primed and ready to answer questions about my limited childcare experience, but I struggled for the right reaction to this casual tour.
“It’s all so—beautiful,” I said.
Ruth indicated the cooktop and fridge in the corner of the sitting room. “The kitchen in the main house will always be available. We’re happy for the au pair to eat with us, or not—whichever they fancy.”
We retraced our steps and this time paused in the day nursery long enough for me to take in its contents. Bookcases bulged with games and toys, and there was a large table covered in art equipment, along with two battered sofas and a television and video recorder.
“He does like to play outside as much as possible,” Ruth said. “But this room’s handy for when you want a quiet hour or two.”
The whole ground floor of Mum’s house would have fitted inside it.
We rejoined the main part of the house through a utility room that opened into the kitchen. Edwin’s artwork covered a corkboard on one wall, and paintbrushes mingled with cutlery on the drainer. Double glass doors opened onto a patio, and I followed Ruth outside, squinting through a dazzle of whirling lawn sprinklers to spot some wooden play equipment in the far corner where the perfectly trimmed grass met the trees.
“We’ve had a difficult couple of years,” Ruth said as Edwin ran ahead to reach his climbing
frame. “I’m looking for someone to keep him company and play with him when I can’t. Most mornings and some afternoons, but I’m quite flexible. No evenings or weekends unless mutually agreed and for extra pay.”
“It sounds great,” I said. “It doesn’t sound like work, to be honest.”
“Wait ’til he’s telling you the train story for the thirtieth time.” She gave me a quick smile. “But no. He’s just full of energy. He needs to be outside climbing and running, but I need to know he’s safe.”
We stopped by the play equipment, and watched Edwin launch himself along the monkey bars.
“It’s just for a year,” she said. “He starts school next September.”
“Well, I’ll retake my exams next May, and then I’ll be free until I start university.” I tapped a strut of the climbing frame. “Touch wood.”
“And you have some experience of working with children?”
I hesitated. “A little. I’ve done a fair bit of babysitting for my neighbors. I like children.” I waited for her to frown, to exclaim that this wasn’t enough, but she was gazing at Edwin as if her mind had already moved on.
“Watch me, Laura Silvey!” Edwin shouted, lining up to shoot down the slide headfirst on his back. He had a false start, so I went over to help him.
We continued our stroll through the garden, slowing at the edge of the woodland to pick our way over the scattered fallen fruit that Ruth told me were greengages. Hundreds more of them hung from the branches overhead, and Ruth and I picked several, passing some to Edwin. They were perfectly ripe, and all three of us exclaimed over their heavenly flavor, spitting the stones away into the undergrowth and wiping our mouths with our hands. The tension in my stomach began to ease.
My early impression of Ruth was of someone self-contained and calm, with a controlled way of moving and speaking. I worried at first that her reserved manner meant she didn’t like me, but as we followed the winding path through the trees, I began to suspect this was her natural personality, and I found myself warming to her. She seemed to forget she was meant to be interviewing me; she complained good-naturedly when she caught cobwebs in her hair, and was gentle in her handling of an earthworm that Edwin presented her with. I examined her in brief sideways glances. Below average height and delicate boned, she was the physical opposite of me. I wondered whether she was always this pale. Perhaps it was due to the difficult time she had mentioned.