The Au Pair

by Emma Rous

  A second tiny infant lay blue and motionless at my feet.

  I leaned against the bath for a while, trying to steady my breathing. Strength flowed back into my limbs as my body finally expelled the placentas. The baby twitched, and I slithered across the wet tiles and hooked my finger into its mouth the way I had seen Dominic do with the first one. There were no towels left, so I peeled my T-shirt off and dried its body as well as I could. A little girl. I held her to my breast while my mind raced ahead. It barely seemed possible that Ruth would accept one illegitimate child of Dominic’s. There was no chance she would agree to a pretense of triplets.

  Could I take her with me? I gazed down at her as she sucked. Back to Mum and Beaky, and a house where appearance was everything and mistakes were not to be tolerated?

  It was impossible.

  They would never let me live there with a baby. We’d be homeless, without family or support.

  It was the shivering that finally made me struggle to my feet, my limbs stiff with cold from the tiled floor. The baby had fallen asleep, and I shuffled to my bedroom and placed her on the middle of my bed, immediately collapsing next to her. I watched her chest rise and fall, her head turn from one side to the other. There was no way out of this. Dominic was going to return and find us, and there could be no happy ending.

  Eventually, I decided I couldn’t bear to be found like this, naked and bloodstained. I hauled myself to the shower and crouched under the hot water, gripping the edge of the shower screen as I swiped at bloodstains on my legs, worried I was going to faint. It took me an age to get dressed afterward, my muscles complaining and refusing to cooperate. When my hairbrush clattered to the floor, the baby startled.

  I carried her through to the day nursery and found a note from Dominic in the bassinet:

  Danny unsettled so am taking him to station with me and Edwin. Everything will be ok.

  D

  I was still shivering as I fumbled a nappy and clothes onto the baby and settled her in the basket. Standing over her, watching her tiny eyelashes flicker as she dozed, I felt a cold calmness filter down through my thoughts. I would stop the futile task of trying to work out how I could fix this, and instead concentrate on one plan: escape. If I could just stay upright, persuade my unsteady legs to carry me on through the day nursery, past the unwashed dishes on the kitchen table, all the way to where the phone sat on the hall table, I could call for help.

  In the hall, no sound came from Ruth and her baby above. Dominic’s car had gone from the drive, and the house was still. I rested my fingertips on the phone, determined to stay on my feet, fearful that if I allowed myself to sit down I might never get up again.

  Even if I could think of a lie that would persuade Mum and Beaky to come and get me, it would take too long. I needed to talk to the taxi company, ask them if they had a driver free who could take me all the way to London—immediately. I needed to leave before Dominic got back and found the second baby. But the taxi base was in King’s Lynn; there was virtually no chance they could get here before Dominic did. I needed someone closer. Someone in the village.

  My finger stroked down the alphabet tabs of the address book and paused on the “K.” Alex would come. My suitcase would fit in his new “family-friendly car.” Alex owed me that much, after everything I’d done for him: letting him know he was going to be a father, liaising back and forth between him and Ruth, keeping his secret safe from Dominic. Alex would help me.

  He picked up after the second ring, his voice a boom in my ear. “Hello?”

  “Alex,” I whispered.

  “Laura? Is that you?”

  I sank onto the chair next to the hall table, my knees trembling. “Alex, can you come? I need you.”

  There was a pause, and then what sounded like a laugh. “She’s had it, hasn’t she? I’m on my way.”

  “No,” I said. “No.” But he’d already hung up. The receiver fell into my lap. I looked up to find Ruth standing halfway down the stairs, holding her baby. She stared at me.

  “Ruth,” I said. I managed to stand.

  “You told him, didn’t you?”

  “I didn’t—I didn’t mean to, Ruth, I swear.”

  “He’s coming for her, isn’t he?” Her face was white.

  I curled my arms around my abdomen. “I just want to go home.”

  She came down the last few steps, her knuckles bloodless against the yellow baby blanket, her eyes darting around the hall.

  “I need to hide her,” she said. “Where can I hide her? I can’t let him take her.”

  The baby gave a high-pitched, reedy wail.

  “Shh, shh,” Ruth said, and then pushed the baby at me. “Take her. Hide her. Keep her quiet. Please, Laura.”

  I didn’t want to hold the child, but she quieted in my arms. She felt solid, heavy compared to the two I’d just given birth to, her sturdy legs drawing up toward her body and then stretching out strongly. She turned her face into my neck, her mouth open, making pecking movements.

  “She’s hungry,” I said, and the baby confirmed this with another creaky cry.

  Ruth strained on tiptoes to wrestle the bolt across the top of the front door. Her face was white, her forehead glistened with sweat. She pressed her forehead against the window, peering down the drive toward the lane.

  “What am I going to do?” Her whole body quivered. “He’ll be here any minute. He’s going to take her. I can’t let him take her.”

  A wave of dizziness hit me, and I leaned back in the chair. The baby gave a full-voiced wail. When Ruth spun around, her pupils were enormous.

  “Give her to me.” She snatched the child from my arms, and then we both heard it: the growl of an approaching car engine. Ruth stood motionless in front of me, clutching the now-silent baby to her chest, and she kept her gaze locked on mine as we held our breaths and listened. The engine roared, then cut out amidst a rattle of gravel. Two car doors slammed, one sharp crack after the other. I braced myself against the crash of the door knocker.

  “Ruth? It’s Alex. Can you let me in please?” His voice was loud but controlled.

  Ruth kept her back to the door, her eyes on me. My heart thudded.

  “Who’s that with you?” she shouted.

  “She’s a maternity nurse. I just want to see my baby.”

  There was a thump on the front door; the letter box rattled.

  “She’s not yours!” Ruth yelled.

  There was an exchange of murmurs outside.

  “She’s a girl? Ruth? Let me in. I just need to see that she’s safe.”

  Ruth drew herself up and swung around to face the door, and with our eye contact broken, I was free to curl over in my seat, hunching my body against another spasm of abdominal pain.

  “She’s not yours!” she shouted again. “Go away!” She swayed for a moment, and I rocked sideways in my seat, thinking to catch her, but she seemed to brace herself and didn’t look at me again. Instead, she set off into the kitchen, the baby moaning against her chest. Moments later I heard the distinctive scrape of patio chair against paving slab, and the baby’s cry faded into the garden. The doorbell chimed, not once but repeatedly, and then the knocker crashed down again.

  “Let me in now,” Alex called, “or I’m calling the police.”

  I looked at the bolt across the top of the door. I had a wild idea of flinging the door open, clambering into Alex’s car, and insisting he take me home. But the pain in my abdomen made me curl over again. Even if I’d found the strength to stand and reach the bolt, I didn’t have the strength to distract Alex from his goal.

  Gravel crunched outside, and I strained my ears—were they moving away from the door? I remembered how easily Alex had jumped over the wall by the stable block, and I was unsurprised after a further minute to hear his voice in the back garden at the kitchen doors.

  “Ruth? He
llo? Where are you?”

  He was inside then, brushing past me, tugging the bolt back and opening the front door. The midwife barged in with an infant car seat in one hand and a large brown medical bag in the other.

  I hauled myself to my feet, and Alex caught me by my upper arms, squeezing them, almost shaking them.

  “It’s a girl?” His mouth stretched into a pleading grin. “I’ve got a daughter?”

  I wasn’t prepared for the tears on his cheeks. I nodded.

  The midwife had moved around us into the kitchen and now loomed in the doorway. “There’s a baby blanket dropped on the lawn,” she said.

  Alex gripped me harder. “Where’s Ruth?”

  My knees trembled and threatened to give way beneath me.

  “Laura?” he said, swaying his face in my field of vision, trying to make me look at him properly. “Where is she? Tell me.”

  “Did she run out?” the midwife asked.

  Alex shook me, less gently this time. “Has she gone to the cliffs?” His voice was hoarse.

  My whole body trembled. I wanted him to look into my eyes and see everything that had happened to me and realize that I was the one who needed him. Ruth and her baby would be fine. I was the one who needed him the most.

  “Did she take the baby to the cliffs, Laura?” His voice was much louder suddenly, his grip on my arms fierce. “Tell me! Did she take the baby with her to the cliffs?”

  I nodded. “Yes.”

  He released me, and as my hand shot out to steady myself on the hall table, I knocked the telephone onto the tiled floor with a smash. Alex sprang away from me, hurrying into the kitchen, and I stumbled to the doorway to watch him jog out to the garden. The midwife began to follow him, but then she made a startled noise and swung back.

  “Stop!” she called out to him. “Wait—come back!”

  Alex hesitated at the edge of the patio. “What is it?”

  A smile crept over the midwife’s face, and she beckoned him back inside. “Listen,” she said. “I can hear her.”

  I held on to the doorframe with both hands, my body rigid, and all three of us listened to the thin wail that floated from the direction of the day nursery. The midwife shot me a dark look, but Alex’s eyes were bright with wonder.

  “She’s in there?” All his former urgency evaporated, and he pushed the door open and padded through the utility area to the day nursery quite tentatively, as if wary of startling the source of the noise. I caught my shoulder on the corner of the wall as I followed, and the jolt of pain stiffened my limbs. As the three of us hesitated at our end of the day nursery, a spindly white-clothed arm rose and waved feebly from the bassinet, and my heart battered in a frantic rhythm.

  “No,” I said. But Alex and the midwife were already halfway there, closing the distance between their hungry expressions and my tiny daughter.

  My throat constricted as they loomed over her. I had to explain. They had it wrong. It was all such a mess. I watched as Alex placed his fingertip in the baby’s palm, and her fingers closed over it immediately. He turned shining eyes to me.

  “She’s beautiful,” he said, and his mouth curved into a smile that I hadn’t seen since our carefree racing on the beach months earlier. “Perfect,” he said. “What’s her name?”

  My throat closed. The future hovered like a boat about to raise its sail, waiting for my next words, suspended between elements, tugged by guilt and love and desperation. Should I tell him the truth: that his daughter was outside with Ruth, probably on the cliff top, waiting for her next feed, oblivious to the adult battles waging around her? Should I tell him that this beautiful, fragile child holding on to his finger was unexpected, unwanted, nameless; not his?

  I opened my mouth.

  “What?” Alex said. “Haven’t they even named her yet?”

  The baby whimpered, and he turned back to her.

  “Hey, little one,” he cooed. I held my breath. He stroked the back of her hand with his thumb. “What shall we call you? Kiara? Do you like that name? You do, don’t you?”

  When I closed my eyes, rectangles of light from the tall windows glowed inside my eyelids. It took all my effort to force my eyes open again, to make myself watch.

  The midwife undid the snaps and peeled back sticky tabs. She tutted, and murmured to Alex, and they bent their heads closer over the basket.

  “What time was she born?” the midwife asked, not bothering to look at me. “When was she last fed?”

  “Where’s Dominic?” Alex asked me.

  “She’s cold,” the midwife said.

  “Does Dominic even know she’s been born?” Alex asked.

  “We need to get her warmed up and fed,” the midwife said.

  Alex gently extracted his finger from the baby’s grasp, and as the midwife began to poke the tiny limbs into different clothes, he turned to me with a frown of concern. I peered around him as he approached. The woman was flipping back the straps of the car seat and sliding her hands into the bassinet.

  “You look terrible, Laura. I’m so sorry you got caught up in all of this.”

  He stepped in between me and the car seat, blocking my view.

  “Laura, listen. I’m going to take her with me. To make sure she’s safe. Okay? Tell Ruth, tell Dominic—to ring me. We can discuss where we go from here.”

  The high-pitched whine of the telephone handset leaked into the room, drilling through my ears and filling my skull with its screech.

  “Are you listening? I can’t leave her here. D’you understand?”

  The midwife swung the car seat sideways as she moved toward the door, hiding the baby’s face from me. Alex gave my hand a brief squeeze, frowning.

  “This is not your fault, Laura. Okay? Get them to ring me.”

  The noise in my head swelled and pulsed. Loud, desperate, relentless. It took me an age to reach the window by the front door. They were gone. Alex and the midwife and my baby daughter were gone.

  31

  Seraphine

  I AM SERAPHINE.

  I am Seraphine. I am Ruth’s daughter. I am the baby who went with my mother to the cliffs. My real father thought he’d taken me—rescued me—but he hadn’t. I stayed here at Summerbourne, with a man who wasn’t my real father.

  I stayed here at Summerbourne and grew up with people whispering behind my back, neighbors scrutinizing my looks, friends asking me why I was so different to my brothers, children teasing me that I came from somewhere else.

  I stayed here at Summerbourne where I belonged.

  Laura looks at her lap while she talks. Edwin, perched next to her, is poised as if expecting her to topple out of her chair at any moment. The three of us on our sofa—Danny, me, and Joel—alternate between gazing at Laura and staring at Alex and Kiara opposite. My relief at being Seraphine—the real, original Seraphine—rushes through my arteries, while a proper understanding of what this means for those I love lags behind, like a poison I am trying not to absorb.

  Alex is shaking his head, his breathing rapid, and by the time Laura finishes speaking, his face is contorted. He bends forward in his seat as if gripped by pain.

  “No,” he says hoarsely. “No.”

  Kiara sits straight-backed, her hands curled into fists, her eyes fixed on Laura.

  “So you’re my mother?” she says eventually.

  Laura meets her gaze and nods.

  “And Dominic was my father,” Kiara says. It’s not a question.

  “I’m not—” Alex staggers to his feet. “Why are you doing this?” He reaches his hands out toward Laura, pleading with her to retract her words, to offer some alternative explanation.

  “Dad,” Kiara says, and then there is an awful moment when Alex’s gaze slides toward me, slipping over my hair and my face, and quickly away again. I feel as though I have swallowed a large, cold pebble
. Whatever else Kiara was going to say dries in her throat.

  I’m too distracted by my own thoughts to realize Danny is about to speak, and his harsh voice sends a jolt through me.

  “So you left us.” He’s speaking to Laura, but he doesn’t look directly at her. “You let him take your daughter, and you left me here, and you went home and put it all behind you.”

  Laura draws herself up. “I know I can’t say anything to make it better, Danny. Telling you I’m sorry doesn’t help. But I am sorry, and I’ve been sorry every single day since.”

  Danny growls deep in his throat. “My father—” he says.

  Laura sways forward slightly. “Your father loved you. From the moment he saw you.”

  I can feel the vibration in Danny’s arm next to mine, and I turn my head and press my face against his shoulder, squeezing his hand.

  Alex tries to pull Kiara to her feet, but she shakes her head.

  “No. We need to talk about this. Here, now.”

  Joel eases himself up as Alex swings toward Laura, and he and Edwin stand on either side of her as Alex lunges forward. She grips the arms of her chair and doesn’t flinch.

  “How could you?” Alex spits, looming over her. “Kiara is my daughter. I’m her father. How could you do this to us?”

  Slowly, Laura pushes herself up, stepping between Edwin and Joel so that she’s face-to-face with Alex, her dark eyes flashing beneath her bandage.

  She lifts her chin to him. “We all did bad things, Alex. You, me, Ruth, Dominic. Just because we haven’t been arrested like Vera doesn’t mean we got away with it.”

  Alex’s face slowly crumples. Laura’s posture softens, and she touches his arm lightly.

  “We need to put the children first now.” She sighs. “I know that’s what we thought we were doing back then, or at least that’s how we justified it. But we need to concentrate on that now.”