The Au Pair

by Emma Rous

  The stroking stopped, and I opened my eyes to find Dominic brushing a strand of hair from my cheek.

  “Then someone like him is a fool,” he said.

  I watched his lips as he leaned toward me. His fingers traced through my hair to the back of my head. We paused with our faces an inch apart.

  “We shouldn’t,” he said. “But you’re just so . . .” His lips brushed against mine, and he drew back, and the sudden movement drew a cold draft between us where the warmth of his chest had just been. I put one hand behind his head and pulled him back down toward me.

  It had been a long time since I’d done this. I thought of Alex as we kissed, at first. We could have . . . But this wasn’t Alex. This was someone who wanted me, who really wanted me right now. The deeper I kissed him, the deeper he kissed me; and the faster I tugged at his clothes, the faster he tugged at mine.

  And I didn’t mind that he wasn’t Alex anymore. I was only aware of the flames and the shadows, and his unfamiliar body against mine. I focused on the moment, with no thoughts of the barriers that ought to separate us, and no consideration of the consequences. We wanted each other. We needed each other.

  “Don’t go,” I said, as he rolled off me afterward.

  He kept his back to me, putting a distance between us even while our bodies were still cooling. The fire had dwindled to flakes of ash. He dragged the curtains apart with a harsh clatter of metal hoops, and rubbed at the condensation on the glass. His hair took on a silvery tint in the moonlight.

  “When is the next blue moon?” I asked from the sofa.

  He shook his head. His shoulders were hunched. I wrapped my arms tighter around my knees.

  A scuffling sound in the hall made us both jump, and I snatched my cardigan from the floor and drew it up to my chin. Dominic stalked to the door, but his posture relaxed as he peered into the hall.

  “Nothing there.” He turned to face me for a moment, his eyes dark in the shadows. “We can’t let this happen again, Laura.”

  I swallowed. “I know.”

  “Are you—?” He indicated my abdomen, frowning.

  My heart bumped painfully against my chest wall. “God, yes. I’m on the pill.”

  “Good.”

  He left then, the stairs creaking rhythmically as he climbed. A door clunked shut above. I curled up on the sofa, stroking the palm of one hand with the thumb of the other, my eyes wide open and dry. The chill of the sea trickled through invisible gaps around the window frame, and the blue moon gazed down unblinkingly at the dead fire and my shivering skin.

  15

  Seraphine

  I STUMBLE AS I cross the road to my car. A sharp pain stabs at my temple, and the metal of the door handle is too bright for my eyes, too hot for my hands. I touch my fingertips to my throat, surprised to find nothing physical restricting my breathing. Helen Luckhurst bustles over the road toward me.

  “Seraphine? Are you all right?”

  I pretend I haven’t heard her and brave the scorching metal, diving into my car and slamming the door between us.

  I crawl along the lane to Summerbourne in second gear. Michael stands at his front gate and lifts a hand in vague greeting. I swerve up onto the grass just after the cottages and stare at him in my rearview mirror. Edwin thinks Michael was there that morning, when my mother was posing with that single baby for the photograph. I climb out and walk back to his cottage.

  “Morning,” Michael says, his eyes narrowing as I place my hand on the gate.

  “Good morning, Mr. Harris. Do you remember me? I’m Seraphine Mayes.”

  He squints at me.

  “You used to call me and my brother the Summerbourne sprites,” I say.

  His eyes widen slightly, and he looks back over his shoulder and calls out, “Joel! Joel!”

  For a long moment nothing happens, and I wonder what on earth I am doing here, upsetting this old man. He was such a figure of authority in my childhood, such a fascinating source of facts and stories that I could cry now at how rapidly his dementia has progressed recently, at the confusion on his face as he looks at me. But then Joel ducks out of the cottage doorway. He has smudges of dirt on his T-shirt, and a shine of sweat on his forehead, and he’s not smiling.

  “Seraphine.” There’s an edge to his voice, and out of nowhere I am engulfed in a wave of regret so overwhelming I can’t draw breath. I have pushed Joel away for so long that we act like distant acquaintances, and yet if I could choose one person in the world at this very moment to be by my side—to be on my side—I would choose him. But it’s too late. I tear my gaze from his face, and focus on the grass by my feet, willing air into my lungs.

  “I just—” I say. It’s too late, Seraphine. You’re too late. “I wanted to talk to Michael . . . But not if—”

  Michael’s demeanor has relaxed since Joel’s appearance. His anxiety gone, he beams suddenly, wagging a finger at me.

  “Oh, I remember you,” he says. “Seraphine Mayes. The little sprite.”

  Joel opens his mouth, a horrified expression forming as he looks from Michael to me, but I interrupt him.

  “It’s okay. Honestly.”

  I meet Joel’s gaze for a second, and he seems moderately reassured, his shoulders relaxing slightly. He indicates a pair of wooden chairs.

  “Well, have a seat in the shade, if you’re sure. I’ll get you a drink.”

  He disappears inside again, and my breathing steadies. Michael is already settling himself into his chair, huffing and puffing, and I perch on the other one.

  “These are lovely,” I say, nodding at the profusion of pink impatiens that spill from a terracotta pot on the table between us, but Michael doesn’t appear to hear.

  “Oh, Seraphine Mayes,” he says. “She can bear a grudge, that one, that’s for sure. Everything’s always someone else’s fault.”

  I clear my throat, checking over my shoulder, hoping Joel didn’t hear that.

  “I’d really like to hear about the day we were born, Mr. Harris. The Summerbourne sprites? Do you remember my mother, Ruth?”

  Michael leans forward with a grunt, to pinch a dead flower head off a plant, but he smiles as he leans back, rolling it between finger and thumb.

  “Oh yes, she were a good woman, Ruth. Kind. Helped me out no end when I had this young’un to look after.” He points his chin at Joel, who has reappeared with two tall glasses of lemonade. “Such a tragedy, her going over the cliff like that.”

  “Grandad, please,” Joel says, placing the glasses on the table.

  “It’s okay,” I say.

  Joel steps back into the cottage and returns with a third chair and a glass for himself, and sits a little apart from us. I twist in my seat to face Michael.

  “Go on, Mr. Harris,” I say. “Can you tell me about that day? About what happened to Ruth, and what happened to her babies?”

  Michael shoots me a sly look then. “Ah, about the sprites, is it? Ruth’s baby got stolen, and the fairies took pity on her and gave her little sprite twins. What d’you think of that, then?” He sits back, looking pleased with himself.

  One baby stolen? This doesn’t even match the story Pamela told me.

  “But, Mr. Harris. It’s a—an interesting story. But what really happened? There’s no such thing as fairies.”

  I give him a tentative smile, but his face darkens.

  “Don’t you be so sure, missy. I seen witches at Summerbourne. Witches that hang in trees and steal babies. I burned their cloaks, you know. Those twins weren’t right.”

  Joel makes a noise in his throat, but I speak first, leaning closer to Michael.

  “Which twins weren’t right, Mr. Harris—me and Danny? What do you mean?”

  “Summerbourne ent never allowed to keep its twins,” Michael says, and his gaze drifts to the end of the lane and the Summerbourne chimneys that
can just be glimpsed over the hedgerow. “One of them, or the other of them, maybe. But not both. Ruth and Robin—the fairies couldn’t let them both live, could they? And—what was his name?—the little blond boy who toddled right over the edge of the cliff.”

  “Theo,” I whisper.

  “That’s it,” Michael says.

  “And what about us, Mr. Harris? What about Danny and Seraphine?”

  “That weren’t right,” he says slowly. “Oh, that family, they wanted their twins again. But what they did weren’t right. I saw the midnight woman come.”

  “Midnight woman?” I prompt. He doesn’t react. The phrase is vaguely familiar, something in the local dialect. “A midwife, do you mean? But my mum didn’t have a midwife.”

  Michael leans forward to peer at me suddenly.

  “Where did you really come from, my dear?” he asks me. “You’re not a Summerbourne twin at all, are you?”

  There’s a loud crack, and suddenly my hand holds only the lower half of my lemonade glass. Curved shards of the upper half skitter away across the tabletop and tumble to the grass beneath.

  Joel jumps to his feet. “Are you okay? Are you hurt?”

  I can’t catch my breath. And I’m staring at Joel because, despite the look of repulsion in his eyes, there’s no surprise. He’s heard all this before.

  “Are you okay?” he asks me again, easing the jagged-edged base of the glass from my fingers.

  “I’m so sorry,” I say. “I must have—misjudged . . .”

  Michael tries to stand, distressed. “Joel? Who is this?”

  Joel bends over Michael’s chair, blocking me from his sight.

  “It’s all right, Grandad,” he says gently. “Sit back down. Everything’s fine.” He sweeps the shards of glass away from Michael’s end of the table, into the jagged base section, and Michael relaxes back in his chair and sighs.

  “You’re a good boy,” Michael murmurs, and then turns to pluck another dead flower head.

  My heart continues to jump as Joel walks with me back to my car.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “He’s getting worse. He doesn’t mean anything by it.”

  His gaze rests on my car, and suddenly I’m acutely conscious of how dirty it is. “I shouldn’t have asked him those questions,” I say. “It was my fault.”

  While Joel’s focus remains on the car, I seize the opportunity to examine him in sideways glances. He’s tense, but underneath that he looks tired, the stubble on his face adding to the impression that he hasn’t been getting enough sleep. I have no idea what else is going on in his life these days. It hurts to see him looking so unhappy.

  “Are you all right?” I ask eventually.

  He looks at me then, and his dark eyes shine with emotion. I lean closer to him despite myself. He shakes his head.

  “He loved telling all the old stories when I was a child, you know? Down at the pub, everyone gathered round him—he was the expert on all the local folklore. Some of it he got from his grandmother, I think, and some of it I expect he made up. He loved being the center of attention. Thrived on it.”

  I nod. I have no memory of ever being taken to the village pub when I was a child, but I remember Michael spinning tales to Danny and me when he paused for a mug of tea in the Summerbourne garden. He could conjure images in our minds quite effortlessly—sneaky pirates, angry fairies, kings and queens and wicked witches.

  “And he told newer stories too,” Joel says. “Gossip, you’d call it, really, mixed in with fanciful embellishments. Some of it maybe too real, too close . . .”

  I watch his forehead crease as he remembers.

  “Ruth and Robin,” he says. “And Theo. Especially Theo, like it was all some horrible nursery tale. It gave me nightmares. I used to wonder sometimes—” He squeezes his eyes shut. I wait. “I used to worry that maybe it was me who undid Theo’s straps. I used to think I could remember seeing him fall.”

  I stare at him. “Joel, no. That’s impossible. You were two years old then. You wouldn’t have been out there on the cliffs on your own.”

  He looks at me for a long moment, and then draws himself up, seems to give himself a shake.

  “I know. Of course, it’s ridiculous. It just—it brought it back, hearing him just now, those horrible stories, and I’m—” He cuts off whatever else he was about to say.

  I want to tell him I’m here for him. To tell him everything will be okay. I reach my fingers toward his, and he catches hold of them, and for a moment we stand there, linked, and my pulse rate soars.

  “I wish—” he says, and his eyes search mine, and I hold my breath as I wait for him to continue. But his gaze slides over my shoulder to the cottage garden where Michael still sits, and my fingers slip from his, and then we both take a deep breath and turn to look at my car.

  “I’m so sorry about your dad,” Joel says eventually, and all I can do is nod, and then I climb into my car and leave him standing there, his figure a blur in my rearview mirror as I drive the final hundred meters back to Summerbourne.

  In the shed behind the stable block, I knock over rakes and hoes in my hurry to pull out a gardening fork, leaving a jumble of wooden handles crisscrossed behind me. I march back to where the letters scar the front lawn and stab the tips of the fork into the sunbaked ground, stamping on the horizontal bar in an attempt to drive the prongs farther in. I manage to lever up clumps of earth and twist the top layer of grass and soil until the word is obscured. Kids, I tell myself. Just kids from the village, messing around.

  I sit at the kitchen table with a mug of strong coffee, waiting for my tears to stop. I think about Joel growing up listening to Michael’s stories—all the drama and sorrows of their neighbors turned into gruesome tales to entertain and scare little children. I never saw any malice in his tales when I was a child, but of course he’d have saved the Summerbourne stories for a different audience. How many of the villagers grew up hearing about Summerbourne sprites and curses and ill-fated twins?

  And suddenly, I wonder whether Michael is capable of scaring people in other ways, despite his memory lapses and his failing strength. Does he have more lucid days? Could he have sneaked onto our front lawn under cover of darkness and scorched a warning into the grass with weed killer? But Michael seemed happy enough to talk about our family history today, even if his accounts were jumbled. The “STOP” message can’t have been from him. I shake my head.

  “Just stupid kids,” I say aloud. But the possibility of a more sinister explanation continues to gnaw at me. I still don’t know what happened here on the day I was born; I still don’t know why Mum and Dad appeared to be celebrating one baby rather than two. What if someone is warning me to stop asking questions? What are they trying to hide?

  The sun is high, and Vera’s pills glint at me from their square-shouldered pot, and I decide that a soak in the bath might make me feel better. I carry my mug upstairs, but at the entrance to the bathroom it slips from my grasp. Scalding coffee splashes up my legs, and shards of crockery fly in all directions, but my gaze is fixed on the mirror over the sink. A message is scrawled in dark red lipstick across it: “STOP ASKING QUESTIONS OR LOSE YOUR FAMILY.”

  Someone has been here, inside my house.

  All doubt vanishes with those seven red words. Someone has been here, inside my house, and they want to stop me finding out the truth.

  I step back onto a sliver of broken mug, slicing my heel. The adrenaline that’s making my heart hammer overrides any pain. I need to tell someone. I need help. I need to call the police.

  My phone’s downstairs somewhere. On the kitchen table? I stagger lopsidedly down the stairs, gripping the banister, leaving a trail of blood spots behind me. There’s no handset on the landline base in the hall. Did I leave it somewhere? My mobile lights up seconds before I reach it, cheery green and blue notifications oblivious to my fear.
r />   I tap nine twice, but hesitate before the third one, straining my ears for any sound in the house, feeling the drumming of my pulse start to ease. Is a message on a mirror an emergency? I need to think.

  This is the first time I’ve been in that bathroom since I came back from London and Leeds: I collapsed in bed fully dressed last night, and shot out to see Pamela this morning after finding the scorch marks in the lawn. The lipstick message might easily have been written forty-eight hours ago; the perpetrator surely long gone.

  I picture a police car skidding onto the drive; me leading frowning officers upstairs, pointing at some lipstick writing. The police officers annoyed, or—worse—amused. I clench my jaw.

  The nonemergency number, then. The local police station. Martin Larch.

  I’d have to tell Martin about the letters burned into the grass as well, of course, and the address that was taken from my handbag. Which means I’d have to tell him about tracking down Laura, and the threatening letter she received, and its mention of Summerbourne and Dad. I’d have to explain about the photo and the missing baby, and my fear that I’m not really Seraphine Mayes at all.

  Can I face that?

  As I have done many times before in moments of doubt, I turn to the fail-safe mantra of my childhood: Edwin will know what to do.

  I dial Edwin’s mobile, but it rings on and on unanswered. I try Winterbourne, then Danny, then Vera. No one picks up. For a brief moment my thumb hovers over Dad’s number, which I still can’t bring myself to delete, and then I let the phone clatter onto the table. I could run back to Michael’s, ask Joel to come and take a look at the mirror—but what would I say to him? What could he do?

  I should ring the police. I press my phone back into life. The earlier text was from Pamela: I’m sorry if I upset you this morning. I hope you’re all right. Pamela.

  The blue notification is a Facebook friend request. I’ve been avoiding social media even more than usual, conscious there may be birthday messages from acquaintances who hadn’t heard about my father, followed by a trickle of awkward condolences.