The Au Pair

by Emma Rous

  Laura’s arm twitches under my hand.

  “If I let go of you,” I ask her, “are you going to run away?”

  She manages to tear her attention from the figures on the path to frown at me, but it’s not enough to hide the shine in her eyes. She shakes off my grip and turns in a slow circle, her gaze skimming over the borders, the stone seats, the sundial, the approaching people who are part of our family now.

  “Enjoy the hour,” she says. “How are we supposed to do that, then?”

  “Don’t ask me.”

  She takes a deep breath. “Well. We’ve come this far. I suppose we could give it a go.”

  Something like a smile passes between us then, and I link my arm with hers again, and the two of us set off down the path to meet the others halfway.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I feel incredibly lucky to have the wonderful Rebecca Ritchie as my agent; thank you, Becky, for being so enthusiastic about my book from the outset, and for your ongoing wise advice. I’m enormously grateful to Emma Beswetherick at Piatkus, and to Amanda Bergeron at Berkley, for the combination of your superb editorial skills and insights; thank you both for shaping this story into its best, final version.

  Thank you to Suzanne Harrison, Val Watson, and Jo “the flying vet” Brand, for all the pep talks and cakes. Thank you to the staff and clients of the Cromwell Veterinary Group in Cambridgeshire, for being so gracious about my change of career and for cheering me on. Thank you to Danielle Feasby, for answering all my plant questions (although any horticultural mistakes remain my own). Thank you to Xanthe Randall, for your detailed feedback and positivity at every stage. And thank you to the kind people who gave me feedback on my very first writing attempts and encouraged me to persevere: Rachel Niven, Andrew Baron, Suzie Bishop, Charlotte Harrison, Ami Quenby, and especially my brilliant mother-in-law, Susan Brown.

  Thank you to my parents, Steve and Joan Smith, and to my sisters, Clare Redmond and Lucy Bell, for your unwavering support and delight during this whole process, and to my sons, William, Edward, and Arthur, for celebrating all the highs with me. And finally, to my husband, who cheerfully rearranged our lives so I could chase my writing dream, and who still brings me that all-important cup of tea in bed every morning: I couldn’t have done this without you, Brian (and I’m not just saying that because of the tea). Thank you.

  A CONVERSATION WITH EMMA ROUS

  What inspired you to write The Au Pair?

  I’ve always been fascinated by stories involving uncertain identities—changelings, disguises, trading places. I loved Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper when I was a child, and Mary Rodgers’s Freaky Friday, and later Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley. Alongside this runs the primitive horror of baby switching, whether accidental or deliberate, and the prospect of growing up under the wrong identity. What if you weren’t the person you thought you were? Would you even want to know?

  I’m also intrigued by the concept of having emotional roots in a place, and especially by the sort of attachment that some people form to the house they grow up in. It was while I was mulling over this, along with the issue of identity, that I had the spark of the idea for this story.

  What if there were three babies, born to two mothers, in the same place, on the same day? What if their parents’ secrets led to the infants being passed from one adult to another, and then claimed from different directions: a single twin taken after a wrong assumption; a mismatched pair left behind at a grand country house, where neither completely belonged? And then—what if the only person in possession of all of the facts was the lowliest person in the household: the teenage au pair, who was immediately banished? This was the starting point of the story for me.

  Have you experienced the sort of emotional attachment to a house that Seraphine shows in the book?

  No, never, which is why I was keen to explore the idea. Because of my father’s work, I moved around a lot as a child—I was born in England, went to preschool in Indonesia, started school in Kuwait, turned seven in Portugal, and at the age of ten moved to Fiji for almost three years. In between the stays abroad, my family returned to England for short periods, so I also experienced life at a tiny village primary school in Essex, and I finished my school days at a girls’ grammar school in Colchester. When people ask me where I come from, I don’t have an answer, but I’ve always had the stability of a close family unit around me, so I have absolutely no sense of missing out. But it’s definitely left me with a curiosity about how it might feel to live as an adult in the house you grew up in.

  Have you experienced living in someone else’s house with someone else’s family, as Laura does in the book?

  I’ve never worked as an au pair, but from the ages of around fifteen to nineteen, I spent many weeks gaining work experience on farms for my veterinary courses, sometimes sleeping at the farmhouse and eating all my meals with the family for two or three weeks at a time. Often they were doing me a favor, letting me join them at five o’clock in the morning in the milking parlor to improve my knowledge of cattle health. Occasionally I was genuinely useful, and they paid me, such as when I worked as a night shepherd in Hampshire, patrolling the fields for foxes and helping the ewes deliver their lambs. All the families I stayed with were friendly and hospitable, but it’s tough not being free to return to your own home at the end of the day. I would have found the prospect of working as an au pair for months on end pretty daunting.

  What was your route into writing?

  I had two career ambitions when I was a child: to write stories and to work with animals. I loved my English lessons at school, but I was drawn to maths and sciences as well, and after doing work experience at a local veterinary practice, I applied to vet school. I spent six years studying veterinary medicine and zoology at the University of Cambridge, including summers spent with orangutans in Borneo and collecting data on wildlife in South Africa. After graduation I went straight into small-animal practice, working a one-in-eight on-call rotation and immersing myself in the job entirely.

  In my twenties, I loved the thrill of performing surgical operations. In my thirties, with young children at home and a doctor husband who also worked nights and weekends on call, I dropped to working part-time, and I began to appreciate the “people” side of the job more. I enjoyed reassuring worried clients, helping them understand their pets’ health issues, and (when time allowed) listening to their stories and getting to know them. My desire to write fiction bubbled to the surface now and then, but I knew I couldn’t split my focus three ways—children, vet job, and writing. There are many vets out there who do achieve this, and I am in awe of them! My friends and family were forever asking me, “When are you going to write that book?” but it wasn’t until our youngest child had been settled at school for a couple of years that I reached the “now or never” moment. I decided that if I was ever going to chase my writing dream, I had to commit to it wholeheartedly, which meant I had to make some big changes.

  So, in 2016, I left my job at the veterinary practice where I’d worked for eighteen years and sat down at my computer the very next morning and began to write. I wrote a short children’s story first and submitted it to a few literary agents, and then decided I could write something better. And so I wrote The Au Pair, and in April 2017 several agents requested the full manuscript to read. I was over the moon to accept representation by a wonderfully enthusiastic literary agent, and a few weeks later I was offered my first book deal. And here is the end result! I feel incredibly lucky.

  When and where do you write?

  With three children at school, my core writing hours fall while they’re out of the house, but I also grab time in the evenings and weekends when I need to. Having worked with full consulting lists of ten-minute appointments for years, the flexibility of writing at home is still very much a novelty.

  Where I write depends on what stage I’m at—planning and researching I can do
almost anywhere, but the real writing is done at my computer in our converted attic. My old wooden desk came from our local doctors’ surgery when they were upgrading their furniture, and I have views of fields and trees and a farm in the distance. If I’ve been working for too long without a break, my dog comes and nudges me until I agree to go downstairs and let her out in the garden and make another cup of tea. The cat occasionally stomps across my keyboard, but otherwise it’s a lovely peaceful room to write in.

  What was your biggest challenge when writing The Au Pair?

  From the beginning, I was keen to write the book in alternating chapters, with the two narrators’ stories starting quite separately but converging, until one was telling her story directly to the other. I had no idea whether it would work, whether the number of chapters on each side would match up, whether I’d have to start over with a new method. But my luck held, and the two stories began to slot together the moment Laura declared in Seraphine’s timeline: “Shall we go inside? I think I’d better tell you everything.” Seraphine reciprocates at the beginning of her next chapter: “I can’t tear my eyes from Laura’s face as she finishes telling us about the birth of Ruth’s baby . . .” It worked for me—I hope it works for other readers.

  What did you find most surprising when writing The Au Pair?

  The thing that surprised me most was how real the characters became to me. I’m not sure what my own answer to question nine of the reading group questions below would be—which character would I choose to spend a fictional afternoon with? I have lots of questions for Ruth, assuming I could speak to her before her fall, but I’d be wary of upsetting her after everything she went through losing Theo. I’m a little bit in love with Alex but fear I’d end up getting cross with him about the things he did. Vera would frighten me. Danny still isn’t ready to open up to me. I think in the end I would choose Laura, because I suspect she could share some interesting observations about life and human behavior, if I could just get past her natural discretion and persuade her to trust me . . .

  Thankfully, I was reassured to discover I’m not the only author who thinks of their characters as real people, so I just enjoy the illusion!

  What do you hope readers will take away from The Au Pair?

  That family is about more than just genetics, and that sometimes even the bleakest of situations can become brighter, if we’re willing to give one another a chance.

  QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

  What were your feelings about Summerbourne as the setting for this story? Did you empathize with Seraphine’s attachment to the house, or are you more like Danny as far as bricks and mortar are concerned?

  Seraphine tells us early on she’s “never felt much need for friendships.” Do you think this might have been influenced by her early childhood experiences? Do you think her attitude might have changed at all by the end of the book?

  Laura says to Alex, “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.” Do you think all four of them carry an equal amount of blame for their actions?

  Pregnancy denial is a real phenomenon. Did you pick up on clues in the book that Laura was pregnant—clues that she herself simultaneously mentioned and ignored? Have you come across other forms of psychological denial, such as people refusing to acknowledge problems in their relationships, jobs, health, or behavior?

  The Latin inscription at the folly translates as “A precipice in front, wolves behind.” Do you think this is an apt description of the situation Laura finds herself in after the babies are born? Could she have achieved a better outcome?

  When Vera admits she had initial doubts about the babies’ identities, Seraphine tells us: “I try to embrace [Vera’s] meaning: that it doesn’t matter to her, that she loves us anyway. But it’s not enough. Her love for us doesn’t give her the right to hide the truth from us.” Do you agree? Do you have any sympathy with Vera’s desire to bring up the babies as Summerbourne twins irrespective of where they came from?

  How did Michael’s stories and the village gossip about the Mayes family make you feel? Do you think rumors and gossip are inevitable in any community?

  Do you believe Vera was guilty of all three of the crimes she was charged with—Ruth’s murder, Dominic’s murder, and Laura’s attempted murder?

  If you could spend an afternoon on the Summerbourne patio with any one of the characters from The Au Pair, which one would you choose, and why?

  What do you hope the future might hold for Laura and Seraphine?

  FURTHER READING: FAVORITES ON EMMA ROUS’S BOOKSHELF

  The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, Maggie O’Farrell

  Gillespie and I, Jane Harris

  The Children’s Book, A. S. Byatt

  The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver

  The Lie Tree, Frances Hardinge

  The Swimming Pool, Louise Candlish

  Weightless, Sarah Bannan

  The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro

  Amy and Isabelle, Elizabeth Strout

  Children of Time, Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Little Fires Everywhere, Celeste Ng

  Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray

  Emma Rous is a graduate of the University of Cambridge who spent eighteen years working as a veterinary surgeon. She is now writing full-time and lives with her husband and three school-age sons.

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  facebook.com/emmarousauthor

  twitter.com/EJRous

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