by Emma Rous
“It’s the principle, though, isn’t it?” I say, straightening.
“When you say you argued with her—is she okay?” Edwin asks.
I think of Vera’s hand trembling as she looked at the long-hidden photo of her dead daughter. I remember the obituary that implied she also lost a son. I tear a leaf from the bunch of wildflowers in front of me, and watch it darken as I roll it between my finger and thumb. The smell reminds me of the folly in the rain.
“She’s fine,” I say. “You know Gran. She’ll be fine. But something else—did you know Mum used to have a brother? I thought she was an only child.”
Danny shrugs. Edwin’s eyebrows shoot up.
“Did Gran say that?” Edwin asks. “It’s news to me. What happened to him?”
“I don’t know,” I say.
Edwin stares at me. “And what do you mean you found Laura?”
I shift in my chair. “I found out where she works. At an insurance firm in the city. What do you remember about her?”
Edwin is still frowning, but his gaze drifts to the window.
“She was fun, she was kind. I don’t know what else to say. I remember her living here, and I’m not sure I remember a time before she was here. I suppose they took her on to help Mum after Theo died.”
“September 1991, she started working here. You were three, coming up to four.”
“Well, then.” Edwin shrugs.
“What do you remember about the day Mum died?” I ask quietly, watching him. I’ve asked Edwin this before, of course, particularly when I was a teenager, but he always claimed he couldn’t remember much.
He frowns down at his hands now, and I can see that he is trying. Danny and I exchange a glance.
“I think I do remember that photo being taken, the one you showed me the other night. But maybe I’ve just fabricated that memory, you know?”
Danny raises his eyebrows, and I lift one finger. For all our differences, we’ve always been good at communicating without words. I’ll fetch the photo for him in a minute. He nods. Edwin is still concentrating, trying to remember.
“I think Michael was around that day too. Laura took the photo, but Michael was over by the orchard, and he shouted out—congratulations or something. And I was allowed to have chocolate biscuits for breakfast because of you being born.”
He glances up at me a little sheepishly.
Danny snorts. “Edwin’s famous stomach memory.”
“What else?” I ask. “Which of us was Mum holding?”
“I just don’t know, Seph, I told you. I couldn’t even guess. I remember Mum getting upset at some point, and—and I followed her up to the folly.”
Edwin’s eyes widen as he replays the scene in his mind, and Danny and I sit still, aware of our breathing, waiting for him to go on.
“She was crying. She said someone was coming to steal her baby.”
“What?” Danny and I say in unison.
Edwin takes a moment to return his focus to us, his face stricken. “I don’t know. That’s what I remember. But it can’t be true, can it?”
“Of course not.” Danny frowns. “I mean, I’m sure no one was coming to steal us. But maybe that’s what she believed for some reason—maybe she was having hallucinations or something.”
“What else?” I ask. “What else do you remember?”
Edwin screws his face up, shaking his head.
“Nothing else. Mum told me to go away. I hid in the tower. There was a dead bird. Michael brought me home. I don’t remember what happened after. I don’t remember Laura leaving.”
“What about before that day?” I ask. “When Laura was living here, and Mum was pregnant with us—what was it like?”
“Just—normal, you know. I used to play with Joel a lot, play on the beach.” He thinks for a moment. “I remember getting my bike for Christmas. And having a ride in Uncle Alex’s sports car.”
“Who’s Uncle Alex?” Danny and I ask.
Edwin shrugs. “I don’t know. He had a yellow sports car. I loved that car.”
Danny drains his mug and stretches for the cafetière. “Well, none of that accounts for there only being one baby in the photo. Unless someone did steal one of us”—he looks pointedly at me—“and then brought her straight back when they realized what a nightmare she was.”
“Danny, that doesn’t help,” I snap. “That’s why I thought we should ask Laura. She could tell us exactly what happened that day. She was here.”
Edwin gives me a stern look.
“When you said you found Laura, do you mean you found out where she works, or you actually found her?”
“Both. I went to her office, and I saw her.”
“Did you talk to her?” Edwin asks, and I can’t tell what he’s hoping the answer will be.
“I tried to catch her when she came out of work, but—” I shake my head. “I lost her.”
Danny snorts into his coffee.
“For God’s sake,” Edwin says. “Why? What on earth did you expect her to say?”
I jump up and go to the recipe book, sliding the photo out, keeping my back to my brothers for a few seconds, blinking hard. Then I stalk back and lay the picture faceup on the table between them.
“Look. That’s Mum,” I say to Danny, and he draws the picture closer to himself with one finger, staring.
“She’s just had twins,” I say. “She’s dressed, her hair is neat, I’m pretty sure she’s even got lipstick on. She doesn’t look like someone who’s thinking about killing herself.”
“Seraphine . . .” Edwin murmurs, but he too is frowning at the photo.
“Why did they pose for a family photo with only one of their new babies?” I ask. “Why do they look so—so normal, Mum and Dad, and yet a few hours after this was taken, Mum was dead? I don’t understand how it happened.”
Danny slides the photo toward Edwin and sits back, studying my face.
“It’s a bit—surprising,” Danny says. “But it was such a long time ago, what’s the point of worrying about the details? We know Mum became ill, we know what she did. This photo—if anything, it’s reassuring, isn’t it? Shows they were happy, for a while at least, before it happened.”
Edwin’s voice is quiet as he bends over the picture. “They thought they had all the time in the world to take more photos.”
“But why only one of us?” I ask.
Danny shrugs. “Maybe one of us was asleep, inside, and they didn’t want to wake us.”
“That’s what Gran said.” I can’t keep the skepticism from my voice.
Edwin looks at me. “It’s not just that, is it? What’s really upsetting you? That Dad kept this photo hidden, never showed us?”
I look at him. At his thick mass of light brown hair and his blue eyes and his Mayes jaw. And then I look at Danny, with his darker hair just as thick, his eyes just as blue, his jaw just as strong. These days they look more like twins than Danny and I ever did.
“I don’t think I’m Mum and Dad’s baby,” I say, and my brothers sit speechless, staring at me. “Look at me. My skin’s different, my hair’s different, my eyes are brown. I think I might be someone else’s child.” I press my hands to my cheeks for a few moments, drawing a deep breath in and out. “What if I’m Laura’s baby?”
Danny’s mouth falls open, and Edwin shakes his head, but neither can summon an immediate reply. I shove my chair back, scraping it noisily along the tiles.
“I knew you wouldn’t believe me.” I stumble out to the hall, then on into the sitting room, looking for a box of tissues. Edwin and Danny exchange words behind me, and then follow me in.
“Seraphine, listen to me.” Edwin perches next to me on the sofa. “You’re not sleeping, you’re not eating; it’s no wonder you’re not feeling rational. Dad’s accident—we can’t make sense of that. But th
is—you’re not thinking straight. Of course you’re Mum and Dad’s child. You’re our sister.”
Danny waves the photograph at me. “You look like her, Seph. Look how pretty she was. Everyone always says you get your looks from her, don’t they?” I realize how concerned he is about me when he doesn’t follow this up with a teasing insult.
Edwin nods vigorously. “It’s true. Look at you. You even move like Mum did—graceful, not like me and Lummox here.”
I press my lips together, but I stare at my mother’s short frame in the photo, not so different to mine, and I think about Laura’s height.
“I thought—” I swallow. “But what if Gran wants to leave Summerbourne to Danny because she knows I don’t really belong here?”
Danny coughs. I know he’s covering a chuckle, and I glare at him.
“Ah, come on,” he says. “Can you imagine Granny Vera accepting an interloper at Summerbourne? She’d be outraged!” He draws himself up and does a scarily accurate impression of our grandmother: “‘If you’re not descended from Philip Summerbourne, you can clear orf!’”
I thump him hard on his thigh, but I’m not crying anymore.
“Someone’s coming,” Edwin says suddenly, tilting his ear to the hall, and seconds later the doorbell rings. The three of us look at one another.
“I’ll go,” Edwin says, and we listen as he greets someone at the door and then calls out, “It’s only Joel.”
I groan. If Joel’s staying with Michael, he probably spotted Edwin’s car passing the cottage earlier. I’m still in my dressing gown and not in the mood for any visitors, least of all Joel Harris. Danny opens his mouth to say something, but hesitates, looking from the tissue balled up in my hand to my tear-streaked face.
“Don’t look at me like that,” I say.
“Like what?”
“Pityingly.”
He grins. “Well, you are a bit pathetic, sis.” He hauls himself up and heads for the door. “I’ll shove them through to the kitchen so you can escape upstairs. I’d hate Joel to catch sight of you like this—he’d never come back.”
I stick my tongue out at him as he leaves the room, and then wait until I hear their voices recede into the kitchen before I race upstairs.
Joel Harris is Edwin’s oldest friend, and was a constant visitor to Summerbourne when I was growing up. He knew me as well as my brothers knew me, and he was patient with me even when my brothers weren’t. The four of us spent hours together in the school holidays, and in the absence of friends my own age I grew to idolize Joel.
I was fourteen when Joel and Edwin left for university. Miserable at school, short-tempered with Danny at home, I began to dream of Joel returning and declaring he’d fallen in love with me. I longed to leave the sneers of my classmates behind, and marry Joel, and live happily ever after with him at Summerbourne.
How I miss the days when love seemed so obvious and simple.
My fledgling romantic hopes were crushed a couple of weeks before my fifteenth birthday. I don’t relish revisiting that memory now, but it occurs to me for the first time that something Joel said that day might be linked in some way to what happened when Danny and I were born.
Instead of taking a quick shower, I pad across to the main bathroom and rummage through the cupboard for bath oil as the tub fills. Then I ease down into the hot water to try to recall the details of that day.
It was a hot July afternoon, and Edwin had invited half a dozen university friends to Summerbourne to celebrate finishing their first-year exams. At nineteen, these young men and women seemed impossibly grown-up, drinking beer and cider by the pool, telling anecdotes I couldn’t follow, and cracking jokes I didn’t understand. I studied the girls through my lashes: the sweep of their hair, their glossy nails, the way they adjusted their bikini straps. I tried to mimic them, draping my hair over one shoulder in the hope of catching Joel’s attention, but Joel had barely glanced in my direction since he’d arrived.
Ralph Luckhurst had cycled up from the village to join in the fun, and he and Danny persuaded several of the guests into the pool to play a game of Marco Polo. Edwin remained sprawled on a sun lounger, arguing lazily with a bearded medic friend of Joel’s about politics and the new prime minister. A dentistry student named Ruby, wearing a bright red swimsuit, tried to persuade Edwin to make room for her on his sun lounger. When Edwin refused, she wandered over and sat down right next to Joel.
I close my eyes now, sinking lower in the bathwater, remembering the twist of pain I’d felt under my rib cage as I watched Ruby rest her cheek against Joel’s smooth shoulder. But Joel had been distracted that day, irritable, and I was savagely glad that he only frowned at her when she whispered something in his ear.
“So what’s it like, then, being a twin?” Ruby had asked me suddenly, and it had taken me several seconds to switch from being an unhappy observer to an active participant in the conversation.
“Nothing special,” I’d said.
Danny hauled himself out of the pool and flopped down beside me. “Cheers, sis.”
Ruby and the bearded medic had laughed.
There followed the usual questions—which of us was born first, did we have a telepathic connection, why didn’t we look alike. The others in the pool drifted over to hear our answers, and I let Danny do the talking, uncomfortable under the scrutiny of so many pairs of eyes.
Edwin mentioned that I was twice Danny’s size when we were born, and I remember the way Ruby leaned against Joel as she giggled.
I tip my head right back to soak my hair now, concentrating hard in an attempt to recall Joel’s exact words that day. I’d had the impression he wasn’t following the conversation, and I’d been half disappointed at his indifference, until he suddenly spoke.
“My grandad calls them the Summerbourne sprites,” Joel had said.
I sit up, wringing my hair out, frowning.
It was a name other children had called us when Danny and I first started at the village primary school years earlier. I’d always disliked it, without having any idea where it came from. Over the years, as I learned not to react so fiercely, and perhaps as Danny and I learned to keep our closeness at home separate from our lives at school, the phrase had dropped out of use. For Joel to mention it now, in front of these friends I thought so sophisticated, and to imply that Michael—an adult—still used it to describe us . . . It took my breath away at the time. It still makes my throat tighten now.
I remember staring at him, trying to work out why he’d said it. Joel had always been an ally, never been anything but kind to me. Perhaps he was trying to impress Ruby, I thought. If so, he succeeded.
“Ooh, why are they sprites?” Ruby had said.
“Can they do magic, then?” the bearded medic had asked. “Or do weird things happen around them?”
“Hey, cut it out,” Ralph had said, pushing his dark curls back from his face, flashing me a concerned look. Ralph and I had only overlapped at primary school for a year or so, but he’d defended me from the taunts of older children several times back then, and I loved him for it. On this occasion, the mildly drunk students ignored him.
“You didn’t tell us you had spoo-ooky twins in the family, Edwin.”
“Do us some sprite tricks, won’t you?”
“Careful, Ruby—you wouldn’t want to make them angry!”
Joel had scowled, not meeting my eyes. “Something strange happened here on the day they were born, that’s all,” he’d muttered.
This only encouraged their speculation. The mock alarm escalated, and the jokes continued.
I had expected Edwin to cut them off, to explain that was the day our mother died, actually, to make them feel guilty. But he joined in the laughter and didn’t stop them. And the more they teased, the closer to tears I became, until eventually, I fled, knocking a glass from the poolside table as I ran, covering my ears
as I sprinted into the house and up the stairs to sob under my bedcovers. The memory of Danny’s easy ability to laugh along with their jokes had made me feel even worse.
I avoided Joel for months after that. Even when Edwin explained that Joel had just found out about Michael’s dementia diagnosis that morning, that he’d been preoccupied and miserable about his grandad. Even when Vera left me notes on the hall table saying Joel had rung again, and would I please ring him back. I thought about him every day, but I barely spoke to him for the best part of two years.
And then I did the only thing left that could possibly make the situation worse. I kissed him.
It happened at Edwin’s graduation party, surrounded by all of Edwin’s friends who were celebrating the end of their three-year degree course. I drank too much white cider, and I launched myself at Joel without warning and kissed him. In the ensuing confusion, Ralph Luckhurst misread the situation and punched him, and after that Joel no longer made an effort to talk to me at all.
Now he’s renting somewhere in the village, apparently, working as a family physician for several medical practices to cover gaps in their rosters while he looks for a permanent job. I presume this pattern of work means he can also keep an eye on his grandad while his parents are away. He and I exchange civil words when we have to, and as far as anyone else is concerned, there’s no bad feeling between us, but we are certainly no longer friends.
I cup water in my hands and rinse my face repeatedly before I pull the plug on the cooling bathwater. I refuse to waste another moment dwelling on Joel Harris.
The summerborn sprites. The Summerbourne sprites. I mull over the phrase as I dry my hair and pull on a dress. “Something strange happened here on the day they were born.” Mum thought someone was trying to steal her baby. Just the one baby. She posed for a photograph with just one baby. She gave birth here at Summerbourne with no midwife present, but wouldn’t that have been risky with a twin pregnancy?
I stare at myself in the mirror. Could I get hold of my mother’s medical notes, her pregnancy record, after all these years? It’s ironic that Joel, as a doctor, might be able to tell me the answer, but I’m not about to run downstairs and ask him. Instead, I’ll make an appointment at the village doctor’s office for Monday morning. Pamela Larch has been the nurse there for longer than I can remember, and she knows everything about everyone around here. Maybe she can help me.