The Au Pair

by Emma Rous

  “I don’t know. Vera sorts out the maintenance stuff—I mean, it’s her house. I’ve never really had to—” I take a deep breath, cringing at how spoiled I sound. I want to add, It’s not my house—it’ll never be my house, but I realize that’s hardly the point. I raise my chin. “Does Michael have a key?”

  Joel frowns, and shakes his head slowly. “I don’t know.” He shifts his position to face me more directly. “Look, I understand why you don’t want to tell the police before you’ve spoken to Alex’s daughter. I get it. But I’m worried. You shouldn’t be here by yourself until we know who did these things. The thought of someone . . .”

  “Edwin and Danny are coming tomorrow,” I say.

  “Good.” He looks down at my hand in his, and I can tell he’s choosing his next words carefully. “But tonight. Is there someone you can go and stay with? Or—” He glances up at me. “You could come back to Grandad’s with me now. Take my bed. I’ll sleep downstairs.”

  I’m trying to concentrate on his words, to form an opinion so I can give him an answer, but I’m distracted by the nearness of him, the rise and fall of his chest under his T-shirt, the mesmerizing motion of his eyelashes as he tilts his head.

  “I wish . . .” I say.

  His small movements cease. His gaze locks onto mine. It’s a long moment before his chest begins to rise and fall again. “You wish what?”

  “I wish we’d sorted it out,” I say. “I wish I’d listened to you when you tried to say sorry.”

  “I wish to God I’d never said that stupid nickname,” he says. “I had no idea . . .”

  “How badly I’d react?”

  He blinks at me, and I try to smile back.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “For pushing you away.” I want to say more, but my voice dries up. The moment stretches out in silence, and I close my eyes, concentrating on the heat from his body, the feel of his hand on mine.

  “I missed you, Seraphine,” he says, and when I open my eyes, he brushes a tear from my cheek. But a second later he is on his feet, and there’s something about the tension in his brow and the set of his jaw that spins my memory back to a hazy autumn evening in the Summerbourne garden: the four of us squinting against a low sun, Edwin trying to persuade us to sneak out to the folly, Joel objecting—“We’re not allowed. We’ll get into trouble.”

  His eyes are serious. “Let’s concentrate on keeping you safe tonight, okay? We can’t fix everything in one evening. If you don’t want to come back with me, is there someone in the village you could . . . ?”

  I blink at him.

  He clears his throat. “Okay. So—Grandad’s?”

  I tilt an ear toward the hall, straining for any unfamiliar sound in the house. The hairs on my arms remain settled.

  “Will you stay here?” I ask him. “With me?”

  When he doesn’t reply immediately, I’m afraid he’s going to say no. My gaze slides to the door.

  “I’ll have to pop back to the cottage and let Grandad know,” he says. “But sure. Okay. I can do that.”

  It’s only after he’s gone to check on Michael that I allow myself to replay his words: “I missed you, Seraphine.” But he doesn’t want to talk about that tonight. By the time he returns, I am clearing up the kitchen, wiping the surfaces and tipping my rubbery cheese on toast into the trash bin.

  He has brought back some thick slices of ham wrapped in the white greaseproof paper of the village butcher’s shop. He makes me a sandwich, and while I munch my way through it, we share a beer at the kitchen table. Our conversation is stilted at first, trying to find safe ground in the small news of the village and the mild drama of the current heat wave, but soon we are reminiscing over shared childhood experiences, and we begin to relax.

  “Do you remember our signal system for raiding the greenhouse?” Joel asks.

  “The birdcalls? A wood pigeon if it was your grandad coming, a seagull shriek for Granny Vera.”

  “Wasn’t it a seagull whisper you ended up doing that time your gran showed up?”

  “Well.” I demonstrate my refusal to accept responsibility with a wave of my bread crust. “You were bound to get caught sooner or later.”

  He laughs. “We were always so hungry in those days. I mean, big meals, and then an hour later we’d be starving again.”

  “Remember corn on the cob and potatoes on the bonfire?”

  “They were the best.” He sips his beer. “With melted butter, and we had to use the camping forks ’cause your gran didn’t want the good cutlery lost outside. I still can’t believe you made us take the whole bonfire apart that time.”

  “I definitely saw a hedgehog under there.”

  “And yet—” He spreads his fingers.

  I’m laughing now. “I really did see it, you know.”

  “Sure,” he says. “And Edwin really didn’t mind his potato being raw.”

  “I gave him some of mine, I’m sure.”

  “It was usually me you shared things like that with,” he says, and suddenly our eye contact feels heavy. I look down at my empty plate.

  “Because I liked you.” I shrug. “You weren’t as annoying as my brothers, anyway.”

  “You know, I had to go that night.” His voice is lower now. “After Edwin’s graduation party. I was always going to go straight back to university that night—I was in the middle of exams still.”

  I nod slowly. “Okay.”

  “But I should have come back. Talked to you about it.”

  We look at each other.

  “It was my fault,” I say. “I mean, I didn’t know Ralph was going to hit you, but . . .”

  “We could start over. Try again.”

  I stare at him, my pulse skipping. Does he mean friendship? Does he mean more than that? I open my mouth, but I can’t think how to respond.

  “I know,” he says. “You need to get through the next couple of days first.”

  I realize I’m nodding.

  “Well.” He puffs out a breath. “Let’s hope this Kiara woman can sort everything out.” He gives me a small smile. “I’ll still be here afterward. I’m not going anywhere.”

  A short while later, I show him up to the guest bedroom, feeling suddenly shy in the shadows on the landing.

  “Night, Seraphine,” he says. His pupils are enormous in the dim light. I’m forcibly reminded that he is the one—the one I have always, deep down, wanted to share my life at Summerbourne with. I’m so tempted to reach out and run my fingertips over the smooth skin of his arm, to step closer, to hold on to him. When I force myself to look away, I notice the moonlight glinting on a small shard of broken china nestled up against the skirting board.

  “Good night,” I whisper, and I retreat to my bedroom. I’m tired of puzzling over the threats; I’m tired of keeping secrets from Edwin and Danny; I’m worried about Kiara coming for lunch the day after tomorrow. But Joel’s presence across the landing makes me think that perhaps it’s going to be okay. And we’ll sort everything out between us. Once this is all over and done with. Once I know for sure who I really am.

  18

  Laura

  December 1991

  CHRISTMAS AT MUM’S was miserable. Beaky interrogated me on a range of subjects: Dominic’s job; whether Vera would hand Summerbourne over to Ruth one day; whether the family had given me a Christmas bonus. I had only applied for the au pair job at his insistence—I still remembered his exact words on the day I left hospital and moved back home: “Get down to the agency first thing tomorrow. Let’s see how you like looking after someone else’s brat.” Now that he realized I was genuinely fond of my small charge, he grew increasingly critical of the slightest change in me and mimicked anything I said in a mock upper-class accent.

  “Oh, we don’t do it like this at Summerbourne,” he would say. And then, “I saw your ex down the Feathers agai
n last night. Had a nice chat with him. He couldn’t remember your name.”

  “Don’t listen to him, love,” Mum told me afterward. “He’s just not used to you growing up yet. Just don’t go on too much about this Summerbourne, yeah? It gets his back up.”

  I spent most of the fortnight in my old bedroom. My Bon Jovi posters had been peeled off the walls, and Beaky’s boxes of duty-free wine took up most of the floor space, but my bed was still there, with my swimming trophies lined up along the shelf above it. I sat cross-legged on the bed with my textbooks open, wondering if my ex-boyfriend remembered shoving me out the door, calling me an attention-seeking bitch. He was the total opposite of Alex.

  My thoughts drifted frequently to the way Alex looked at me when he asked me about myself, and the way he listened to me with a half smile forming. I wondered whether he would come back to Summerbourne, and whether he knew yet about Ruth’s pregnancy. I thought about Ruth on the beach saying, “He’d love to have children of his own, of course.” My notes grew dimpled with tears.

  On Christmas morning I hid in that room to unwrap my presents from the Mayes family: a beautifully soft lamb’s wool scarf with matching gloves from Ruth and Dominic, an address book from Vera, and a box of chocolates from Edwin. Mum cooked a turkey with roast potatoes and chipolatas, but my stomach was unsettled all day, and I could only pick at the meal and duck away from Beaky’s permanent glare.

  My birthday two days after Christmas was uneventful. Mum gave me a book, and some pajamas that were too small for me. My friends were all busy, and I hadn’t mentioned the date to the Mayes family. I read my new book in my room and munched my way through the chocolates. When Pati, Jo, and Hazel called by a couple of days later, I told them I was too unwell to come out. I didn’t feel like explaining Summerbourne to anyone else, and I didn’t relish hearing about their new lives either.

  Returning to Summerbourne was like waking from a bad dream. I traveled back on New Year’s Eve—or Old Year’s Night, as they called it in the village—so that I could look after Edwin while Ruth and Dominic attended a party at Kemi and Chris Harris’s house. I felt as though I ought to be paying them for having me back rather than the other way around.

  Edwin danced around me in the hall as Dominic paid the taxi driver behind me.

  “Laura! I got a red bike from Father Christmas. Can we go out and play?”

  The last day of the year was cold and gray, and the interior of the house offered a warm welcome, but I was desperate to wash my lungs out with fresh Summerbourne coastal air.

  “Get your coat on then, quick,” I said, and we took his new bike out for a tour around the garden, giggling at his wobbly progress and delighting in being reunited.

  After Ruth and Dominic had left for the party and Edwin had fallen asleep, I wandered around the sitting room and browsed through the family’s Christmas cards. There must have been over a hundred—arranged along the mantelpiece, the bookshelves, the sideboard. Eventually, I found one from Alex: Have a great Christmas, it said. Hope to see you in the New Year. He won the prize for the blandest message.

  I turned up the volume on the television in the sitting room and listened to Big Ben strike midnight with my face pressed against the window in the hall, watching fireworks explode over the village. The Luckhursts were close neighbors of the Harrises, and I suspected that both Joel and Ralph would still be up, enjoying the celebrations with their parents. I was glad Edwin was safely tucked up asleep in his bed.

  “Happy Old Year’s Night,” I whispered to the darkness. A lone ball of light flared and swooped in a downward arc, leaving a trail like a silver scar in the sky. I was tempted to make a wish, as if it were a falling star. But it was just a firework, and anyway—I didn’t know whether to wish that Alex would come back or that he wouldn’t.

  19

  Seraphine

  JOEL KNOCKS ON my bedroom door early on Friday morning and carries a mug of coffee in to my bedside table. I’ve been awake for a while, mulling over last night’s conversation, and I wish now I’d got up sooner and brushed my hair, put on something more attractive than this old gray T-shirt of Edwin’s that I adopted because it’s so comfortable. I pull my sheet closer to my chin, and he smiles down at me.

  “I have to go—check on Michael before I go to work. You going to be okay ’til Edwin and Danny get here?”

  I nod.

  “Be careful,” he says. “Ring me if you need me.” He pauses at the door on his way out. “Oh, and you look gorgeous by the way.”

  The coffee is the perfect temperature, and I smile into it. But as the caffeine sharpens my thoughts, I am struck by the certain knowledge that Michael does have a key to Summerbourne. When Edwin still lived here, before he moved into Winterbourne, he lost his key at the beach one weekend. He’d joked afterward that he’d been preparing to survive on the fruits of the greenhouse until I got home, cursing his bad luck that none of the usual doors or windows had been left unlocked. But in the end, he said, he’d jumped the wall by the stable block and walked down to Michael’s cottage, and Michael had produced a huge set of assorted keys, one of which had opened Summerbourne’s front door.

  Because they trusted him, I told myself. Dad, or Vera, or Mum—one of them must have given Michael a key at some point because they trusted him. It might even have come from Vera’s parents—Vera celebrates her seventy-fifth birthday next year, and I would guess Michael to be ten years older. He might have been living in that cottage, working for Vera’s parents, long before Vera inherited the house. The old village postmaster once told me my great-grandparents threw scandalous parties here during the “fabulous fifties”: naked dancing on the beach, he told me; babies conceived under cloaks around the campfire; eerie singing from the top of the folly. No wonder Summerbourne has never shrugged off its reputation for being a world apart from the rest of the village.

  I try to picture Michael Harris watching me drive away from Summerbourne on Monday, shuffling down the lane, letting himself in, climbing the stairs, writing with lipstick on the mirror. I throw off my sheet and head for the shower. It’s beyond ridiculous.

  Joel has left me a note on the kitchen table: Eat breakfast. I blast some instant porridge in the microwave and force it down. Then I push my lurking anxieties to the back of my mind and concentrate on scrubbing the kitchen and running the vacuum cleaner around the ground floor. I don’t need to rely on Vera remembering to send in cleaners. I throw open every window and all of the back doors, and the fresh sea breeze clears the stale air from the house.

  Until last month, my solitude at Summerbourne was interrupted regularly by visits from Dad. If Edwin came with him, he and Dad would happily spend a Sunday morning preparing a roast dinner, and if Vera joined us, we would shake out the old red tablecloth and make an event of it. Danny spends the odd week here too, in between overseas volunteering projects; he makes popcorn when I get in from work, and we binge-watch old movies together.

  But I rarely have other visitors. Perhaps I don’t feel the same need for friends that other people do. Outside my family, the only person I ever longed to be close to was Joel, and I made a total mess of that. When acquaintances in the village ask me to the pub, or a party, or a barbecue, I make my excuses. I prefer my own company. Today, I try to convince myself, as I count napkins and swipe cobwebs out of corners, that this is the reason for my growing nervousness about Kiara’s impending visit. Not that I’m frightened of what she might say. Not that I’m frightened I might regret ever meeting her.

  While I’m peering into the fridge, wondering if the pasta salads are still safe to eat, my phone beeps with a text from Danny: Ok if I bring Brooke along tonight?

  As if I don’t have enough to worry about already with Kiara coming tomorrow. Does this mean Danny’s serious about this woman? Has he told her yet that the house will be his one day?

  I slam the fridge door shut, empty-handed. Would love to
see Brooke sometime, I type, but this weekend not really best time. Hope you agree? S.

  Much later he replies: Ok no worries.

  Midafternoon, the house is more or less visitor ready when the doorbell rings. A van stands on the drive with the driver’s door hanging open, Luckhurst Landscape Gardening printed on the side. My surge of adrenaline doesn’t recede. Ralph Luckhurst? What’s he doing here?

  “Hi,” he says. He stands a couple of meters back from the step with his hands in his pockets. He’s grown a beard since I last saw him, and its effect in combination with his dark curls is dramatic. He looks so much older, more serious than ever. “Sorry. I promised your gran I’d take a quick look at the back lawn, but I can do it some other time. It’s just, you know, my mum asked me to check you’re okay as well.”

  “I’m fine,” I say automatically, staring at him.

  He’s like a stranger these days. He was always kind to me when we were children, but his interest in me grew more intense as the years passed. Five years older than me, he used to wait for me outside my sixth form college when I was seventeen, offering to take me to the cinema or out for a drink. I said yes a few times, trying to convince myself I fancied him, trying to take my mind off Joel.

  Ralph had been there at the pool party and knew I’d spent the subsequent two years trying to avoid Joel, so when he saw us kissing at Edwin’s graduation party, he assumed that Joel was harassing me and reacted accordingly. Joel left the party with a black eye, too shocked to listen to my drunken apologies. Ralph and I maintained a lopsided friendship for another year, but we drifted apart when I left for university. My romantic life has always been a disaster.

  Ralph squints toward the patch of damaged grass when I tell him I’m fine.

  “Good,” he says. “My mum said you looked upset the other day, that’s all, but I’m glad you’re fine.” He takes a step back.