The Au Pair

by Emma Rous

  Who am I?

  The pounding at the base of my skull worsens with every mile.

  A dead bird lies on my front doorstep when I finally reach home. I nudge it with the tip of my shoe. Spindly pink toes and black beak point to the sky; its eyes are half closed and sunken. I crane my neck to look for a mark on the window above—perhaps it stunned itself against the glass and failed to recover from the impact. When I step over it into the hall, a single black feather wafts across the tiles ahead of me, and my breath catches in my throat. I slam the door shut behind me. I could have sworn that feather was already inside the house when I opened the door. I’m losing my mind. I turn my key in the lock, and stand on tiptoes to wrestle the rarely used bolt across.

  My neck muscles tighten more with every minute that passes, and I draw my shoulders up under my ears. When I fumble for a packet of painkillers in the kitchen cupboard, Vera’s pot of sleeping pills tumbles out onto the counter. I swallow a couple of ibuprofen tablets, and then stand in front of the open fridge for several minutes, concentrating on taking slow, deep breaths as the chilled air washes over my skin. The tubs of cold pasta that Edwin left for me stare sullenly out. As the interior of the fridge reaches room temperature, I kick the door shut and rummage through the pantry for a packet of crackers.

  A flurry of movement in the garden makes me jump. I press my forehead against the glass doors, peering at the overgrown bushes along the edge of the lawn. A band of pink still decorates the sky, but dusk is merging into night, and it’s difficult to distinguish shapes from shadows. A fox, perhaps? When I turn back to the brightly lit clutter on the kitchen surfaces, my gaze falls on Vera’s pill pot. The lozenges inside are tiny—could they really be powerful enough to override the whirling thoughts in my brain? The prospect of surrendering to a night of dreamless sleep is too much to resist, and I gulp one of the pills down with a glass of water, barely feeling it as it slips down my throat.

  I munch through another cracker as I pace around the house, checking that all the windows and doors are locked. The drug begins to work sooner than I expected. Or perhaps it’s my own exhaustion that makes my eyelids droop as I haul myself up the stairs. A numbness sloshes through my thoughts, dragging them under the surface of my consciousness. I throw myself onto my bed without undressing, and slip into a deep sleep.

  Images of the sea fill my mind as I gradually wake in the morning. Bright sunlight bounces around my room, and an intermittent buzzing grows more familiar until I realize it’s coming from my phone. It takes me a further minute to focus on the screen.

  A text from Pamela Larch: I thought of something else. It’s not very nice, I’m afraid. If you can pop down to the office this morning, we can have a chat. Pamela.

  What on earth does “not very nice” mean, coming from Pamela? Did she type something else, something more specific, and then change it to this blandest of warnings? A nurse who deals with cancers and amputations, death and mental breakdowns. What would count as “not very nice”?

  My legs are heavy as I plod down the stairs, and I’m desperately thirsty, but I’m seized by an overwhelming need to see whether the dead bird is still on the doorstep. The stiff bolt hurts my fingers, and when I finally swing the door open, I am momentarily blinded by the sun’s glare. The bird has gone. I scan the drive. Perhaps a cat took it in the night, or a fox. Something catches my eye on the narrow curve of lawn that borders the circular driveway. I take a few steps toward it, but the sharp stones under my bare feet make me wince. It looks as though marks have been burned into the scruffy grass.

  My heart pounds as I haul myself back upstairs to my bedroom window. The letters scorched into the lawn are angled as if designed to be read from this exact viewpoint. Chills creep along my arms as I stare at the word they form: “STOP.”

  I stumble back down to the kitchen and try to think of innocent explanations while I pop more ibuprofen tablets through their foil seal, waiting for the kitchen tap to run cold. Village kids messing around? One of my brothers playing a joke? A rogue act by the unreliable gardening company? There must be a rational explanation. The pills make me gag. I have a sudden urge to escape from the house, to put some distance between myself and those blackened letters while I work out what to do. The doctor’s office will already be open, so I’ll head straight there and find out what it is that Pamela has remembered. I hold my breath as I dash out to my car, my line of sight squeezed between the damaged grass on one side and the spot where Dad’s head hit the gravel on the other side. The steering wheel is clammy under my fingers, and I accelerate past the flint cottages although no neighbors are in sight.

  As ever, the office is quiet. Hayley Pickersgill stares at me from behind her desk, and I ignore her, painfully aware that I’m still wearing yesterday’s rumpled clothes and haven’t brushed my teeth this morning, let alone my hair. My head pounds. Pamela’s door is open, and when I peer in, I catch her scrolling through her phone. The staff here have too much time on their hands, I think.

  “Seraphine, come in. Please, sit down.” Pamela’s bright eyes scrutinize me, and her mouth tightens.

  “Pamela.” I attempt a smile. “You said you remembered something?”

  She repositions herself in her chair. “Well, I wasn’t sure whether to mention it. Martin thinks I shouldn’t.” She frowns. “But it might be relevant. To what you want to know—about the pregnancies and births in your family, I mean.”

  I nod, gripping the plastic arms of my chair, watching her.

  “It’s something people used to talk about when I was little,” she says. “In the village. In the playground at school. Your mum was a few years older than us. In the top class, I think, when Martin and I were in the infants. But we knew all about her. You know what the village is like.”

  I nod again.

  “Well,” she says. “She had a twin. Your mother, I mean. She had a twin brother.”

  “Oh right,” I say. “Yes.” The brother mentioned in my mother’s obituary. “Do you know what happened to him?”

  “Well, he died, you see.” She’s twisting a pen over and over in her hands, and she looks down at this now rather than at me. “Before he was born. Your grandmother was pregnant with twins, but only Ruth survived.”

  “Oh.” I stare at her. “That’s so sad. Gran never said.”

  “I don’t remember his name,” she says. “I’m sorry.”

  I shake my head. “Well, it was before you were born. It must have been terrible for Gran.” I think about Vera, and the way she always makes a point of referring to Danny and me as the Summerbourne twins. I feel guilty to remember how it sometimes irritated me, now that I know she lost her own twin baby, as well as her grandson Theo.

  “But—” I say. “Why did Martin think you shouldn’t tell me?”

  Pamela fiddles with her pen again. “Well, not that bit. It was what the other kids used to say, you see. They used to—to say mean things to her about it. Nasty things.” She swallows. “They said that Ruth strangled him.”

  My mouth falls open. “What?”

  “He was born dead, you see, with the cord around his neck. They said she wrapped it round his neck while they were still inside the womb together—twice around his neck, they said—and then she choked him to death. On purpose.”

  I stare at her. “But that’s—ridiculous. Horrific. How could they say that?”

  “I know,” she says. “And of course it’s not true.”

  “Well, of course not.”

  “But I think that’s what reminded people of . . . the other stories. The old stories.”

  Her fingers are still now. She waits, and I sense she is giving me a chance to walk away, to say I don’t want to hear.

  “What old stories?” I ask.

  “That twins never survive at Summerbourne,” Pamela says.

  She meets my eyes then, and her expression is apologetic, a
lmost fearful.

  I try to keep my voice calm, but my pulse is jumping. “That’s—what do you mean?”

  “The original Summerbourne, the man who built the house,” she says. “He got into financial difficulties, apparently, nearly went bankrupt. He had baby twins, and they say he cheated people in the village. Claimed he’d paid them for goods and services when he hadn’t, that sort of thing.”

  I watch her. “This was a very long time ago.”

  “I know,” she says. “So the story goes that it was a local stonemason that built the folly for him, did all those carvings and everything. And the village blacksmith made the cannon for the sundial. And when it was all finished, Mr. Summerbourne, he said a certain price had been agreed, and the stonemason and blacksmith said it was double that, and they argued—you can imagine. And the villagers threatened to knock the whole thing down. But when they went up there, all angry, Mr. Summerbourne had parked his baby twins inside the circular wall, right up against the tower, in their baby carriage. Fast asleep.”

  I’m transfixed despite myself. “Go on.”

  Pamela blows out a puff of air. “Well, the villagers turned back. They were decent people; they didn’t want a scene with the babies crying and everyone shouting and all that. So they cut their losses and went home. But that night . . .” She frowns at me. “That night, one of them babies disappeared from its cot in the nursery at Summerbourne. Vanished, just like that.”

  I swallow. “What happened?”

  “They never found a trace. No sign of a break-in; everyone had an alibi. People said the fairies had taken him as a punishment.”

  A laugh escapes me. “Right. Okay. Fairies obviously much more likely than a human being with a grudge.”

  Pamela’s look is almost disapproving. “I’m just telling you what they say. That from that day on, the Summerbourne family hasn’t been allowed to keep its twins. Your mother’s twin brother—died in the womb. Your older brother Theo—fell over the cliff. And you and Danny . . .”

  I stare at her. “Me and Danny what?”

  “Well, some people say your poor mother bargained with her life to try to keep both of you safe . . .”

  I shove my chair backward, scrambling to move away from her. “How can you say that?”

  “And some people say . . .” She stretches a hand toward me. “I’m sorry, Seraphine, but you wanted to know . . .”

  My heart is pounding. I stumble backward until the door handle jabs into the small of my back. “What?”

  “Some people say it didn’t work. That someone took your mother’s real babies anyway. That you and Danny aren’t real Summerbourne twins at all.” She tilts her head, her expression sympathetic. “I’m sorry, Seraphine, and I’m sure it can’t be true, but I feel you ought to know that that’s what people say.”

  I fumble for the door handle and finally wrench it open. Hayley straightens in her seat as I lurch into the waiting room, her mouth falling open. Out in the high street the sun is high and fierce, and everything around me shimmers with heat. Houses and cars and lampposts look strangely distorted. I’m not certain whether I’ve actually woken up this morning, or whether I’m trapped in a nightmare.

  14

  Laura

  November 1991

  DOMINIC DID RETURN to Summerbourne after dropping Ruth and Vera at their hotel. It was already dark, and he brought the crisp chill of the November night into the hall with him.

  “Guess where we’re going tomorrow,” he said to Edwin. “I’ll give you a clue: lots of water and lots of fishes.”

  “The sea!” Edwin shouted.

  “The aquarium,” Dominic said. He gave me a quick grin. “Didn’t fancy going back to work just for one day.”

  When I came down from putting Edwin to bed, Dominic called me into the sitting room. The curtains were open, and he was gazing out at the sky, his back to me.

  “It’s a blue moon tonight,” he said. “Come and look.”

  I stood alongside him. Warm air rose from the radiator and mingled with the cold breath of the glass.

  “It doesn’t look blue.”

  He chuckled. “It’s an old farmer’s term. When a season has four full moons instead of three—it doesn’t happen very often—the third one is called a blue moon.”

  “Oh. I didn’t know it was an actual thing.” I thought about it. “Why isn’t it the last one that’s called the blue moon? The fourth one is the extra one, surely?”

  He gave me a sideways glance. “I’ve no idea. I never thought about it like that.”

  I leaned closer to the window to peer at it, my breath misting the glass.

  “I’m shocked,” I said. “That it’s not actually blue.”

  “Wait ’til you see a black moon.” He turned to me, his hip against the windowsill. “Next summer. I’ll find the date for you. You’ll be quite overwhelmed.”

  “Oh.”

  He smiled. “Some people say a blue moon is just a second full moon in a calendar month. Much more common.”

  I sucked in my breath. “How dare they!”

  A bark of laughter escaped him, and he swiveled farther round to lean back against the radiator. The surprise in his eyes blinked into a more focused gleam.

  “There’s more to you than you let on, isn’t there?” he said.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “You never talk about yourself. Your home.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t think about it much.”

  “To a lot of people it’s the most important thing about them. Where they come from. Who their family is.”

  “Not to me,” I said.

  “You lived with your mum, before this?”

  I nodded. “And Beaky. Her partner. He doesn’t like me.”

  Dominic’s eyebrows shot up. “Beaky?”

  “Yep.”

  He studied my face. “Was it that bad?”

  I walked away, pausing at the coffee table with my back to him. An opened bottle of red wine waited on it, two glasses by its side. Dominic’s sleeve brushed against mine on his way to the sofa.

  “Join me?” He picked up the bottle and tilted a glass toward me questioningly.

  I hesitated. The sitting room door was ajar, the curtains open. I rubbed my arms.

  “I’ll light the fire,” he said. “We should celebrate the blue moon. Here, sit.”

  I pulled the curtains closed before sinking onto the sofa. The wine was warm, and I swirled it around my mouth, trying to get used to the bitter furriness of it as I watched Dominic crouch over the hearth with a box of matches. He coaxed a pile of kindling into flames, then arranged logs over the top. A billow of smoke puffed into the room, carrying an aroma of something musty and old.

  “So what do you want to do with your life, then?” he asked as he sank down next to me with his own full glass. “After you finish here, after your biochemistry degree or whatever?” I curled up in my half of the sofa and sighed.

  “I don’t know. Travel, maybe.”

  “With your friends?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. We used to talk about it. They’ve probably made new plans by now.”

  “You’re very good with Edwin. I can see you settling down and having a family of your own one day.”

  The heavy flavor of the wine had grown on me, and I drained my glass. “Yeah.”

  “But meanwhile, the world is your oyster.”

  “I’d walk away from everything if I could,” I said. “Start again. Be someone new.”

  “Reinvent yourself?”

  I looked directly at him then. His expression was open, no glint of judgment in his eyes. I held his gaze for a moment, and then nodded.

  “Yeah. That’d be nice.”

  He considered this, and didn’t press me further. The combination of wine and warmth and
companionable silence helped my muscles relax, and I shifted into a more comfortable position. He refilled my glass, and we sat and watched the flames dance over the puckering logs.

  “Funny thing, life,” he said eventually. His voice was low and scratchy. “One minute you’ve got everything you ever wanted, and the next minute . . .” His pupils were dilated in the low light, reflecting the flickering yellow of the fire.

  “Theo,” I said.

  He tipped his head back, staring at the ceiling. “Did Ruth tell you how it happened?”

  “Alex told me.”

  “I think about it all the time. I think about him all the time.”

  I leaned toward him, and placed my hand over his. His hands were broader than Alex’s, and not as smooth; his knuckles bore smudges of soot from the fire, and it made him seem vulnerable somehow.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  He rolled his head forward, tucking his chin down and studying my hand. He turned it over, running his thumb over my palm. A tingle spread through my body, and I savored the sensation.

  “You know, it’s funny,” he said. “I thought—that day we all went to the beach. When you went on the Topper with Alex. I thought maybe you two might . . . ?”

  I shook my head, tried to smile. “Nope.”

  “Ah.” He stroked my palm again, and then looked at me. “You wanted to?”

  When I didn’t answer straightaway, he turned his attention back to my hand. I closed my eyes to concentrate on the feeling of his thumb running along the underside of my fingers, crossing my palm, stroking circles on the inside of my wrist. I felt as though I was floating, as if my muscles had melted.

  “Someone like him would never be interested in someone like me,” I said, without opening my eyes. I was picturing the way Alex watched Ruth’s movements, from under half-lowered lids, his concentration intense. I was picturing the way he’d stood on the doorstep in the rain, his clothes dripping, craning his neck for a glimpse of her.