Mistress of Night and Dawn (5 page)

‘Chilli, I think,’ Ginger said as he took a sip.

‘No, paprika,’ Siv replied firmly. ‘I’m one quarter Hungarian. I know the flavour,’ she added to give weight to her assertion.

‘Love,’ Aurelia said dreamily. ‘It tastes like love.’ She touched her fingertips to her lips.

‘Have you lost it?’ asked Siv, staring at her. ‘Maybe we should get home . . .’ She glanced at her watch. ‘Shit! It’s nearly midnight.’

The girls fled from the fair in such a rush that neither of them had a moment to remark upon the subtle changes that they each observed as they passed through the wide arches that marked the exit. Outside, the air was a little cooler, the light a little duller and the scent in the air a little sour, particularly in comparison with the heady aroma of cocoa and spices that had filled the employees’ bar.

Siv squinted momentarily to find her bearings, looking for a sign that would point them in the direction of the Northern Line and Aurelia cursed gently under her breath when she realised that she had misplaced her gloves. Both of them disregarded the sudden tightness in their chests and the catch in their throats and the heaviness that had taken hold of their legs. It was as if they were pulling on invisible threads that still connected them to the centre of the fun fair and did not want to let them go.

They ran down the platform hollering, ‘hold the doors!’ and leaped aboard the last train to Leigh-on-Sea no more than a moment before its departure from Liverpool Street station. Siv sat down with a thump of relief and promptly fell asleep, spending the rest of the journey snoring softly on Aurelia’s lap, whilst Aurelia ignored the drunk and rowdy late-night passengers who mumbled ‘All right, love’ at her as they stumbled through the narrow carriage, leaving a trail of burger wrappers and half-eaten chips in their wake.

She stepped from the carriage and inhaled the sea air so deeply that the salt stung her nostrils. As the train rumbled off into the morning, Aurelia had the sense that in some inexplicable way her life had changed, and she would never be the same again.

Much to their surprise, neither Aurelia’s godparents nor Siv’s parents had been as upset by their late arrival as the girls had feared.

‘You’re grown up now, I suppose,’ Siv’s dad said to them as they’d stumbled downstairs the morning after the fair. There was a note of sadness in his voice, though on later occasions he had cause to mutter under his breath at the fickleness of teenagers.

After that, both Aurelia and Siv were given tacit permission to stay out late at night or even not come home at all, but neither of the girls was inclined to use it.

The truth of it was that the fair had changed them both, in small but noticeable ways. Siv became more focused and almost studious, albeit in a physical rather than an academic sense, with all of her spare time and energy devoted to practising ‘tricks’. She continued to date the ticket collector who was now officially courting her in an old-fashioned manner, commuting down to the coast whenever he had free time. His name, as it turned out, was Harry, but the girls continued to call him Ginger, and he would still mostly refer to Siv as Short. Aurelia was always just Aurelia. She had never been the sort of girl who suited nicknames.

Ginger had some skill with rigging, and Siv had convinced him to set up a practice trapeze in her parents’ garage, where she swung from beam to beam and rope to rope like a jungle creature. Accidents were inevitable and Ginger spent a good deal of his time patching her up and grumbling that her father would think him a wife beater if he continued to send her back into the house with bruises. But Siv gradually grew stronger and her once slight shoulders, though not bulky, became distinctly toned.

The exercise suited Siv, and gave a focus to the bubbling pool of aggression that she carried inside so that soon she rarely snapped at anyone, even the young skateboarders who came whizzing along the footpath by the estuary too close to the girls’ ankles as they walked past the pier.

Aurelia, too, had been preoccupied since that day and night spent on the heath, though her thoughts turned in a distinctly different direction, and always returned with predictable inevitability to the stranger and his kiss.

At first she had simply replayed the feeling of his lips against hers over and over, but when those thoughts became tired she began to imagine how his mouth would feel on other parts of her body until, eventually, she wasn’t sure which parts of her daydreams were memory and which parts invented. Sometimes she felt that she had dreamed the whole thing and other times she thought that it must have been more than a kiss, but that she had somehow forgotten the rest. Her memory of the event was in some respects so absolutely keen and clear, and in other respects impossible to get straight in her mind. Thinking about it was like trying to find the edge of water.

When she was alone, Aurelia’s thoughts were always accompanied by self-pleasure. She went about her routine with the slow, concentrated languidness with which she approached everything that she set her mind to. Often, she ran a bath, surrounded the rim with a hundred or more tea-light candles nestled side by side and lay in the water touching herself until it turned cold hours later. She rarely came, preferring instead to enjoy the residual feeling of sexual frustration that permeated her being for days.

She had, of course, told Siv about the kiss. Siv initially reacted with eager interest. It was the first time she’d known her friend to have a crush. But as time went by and Aurelia continued to be fixated with the stranger, Siv grew bored and stopped asking her to try to at least remember what he had looked like or what he had been wearing.

The only thing Aurelia recalled with any certainty was his scent.

‘Pomegranate,’ she told Siv.

‘Pomegranate?’ Siv scoffed. ‘Men don’t smell like pomegranate.’

Aurelia began to eat the flesh of the deep-red fruits for breakfast most mornings. She was surprised by the bitter aftertaste, but soon began to enjoy the contradiction of the harsh and woody tang that followed the initial sweetness of each mouthful. And she liked to run her tongue over the seeds and think of the stranger.

Eventually, though, the fun fair became just another memory, and the girls returned to their usual routine of school interspersed with drama and dance classes, Aurelia’s part-time job at the florist in Old Leigh and Siv’s Saturday mornings behind the till selling playing cards and whoopee cushions at a local emporium. Sundays were reserved for spending their wages and socialising. Life continued in much the same vein for several months. Exams came, were duly ticked off, and a time for decisions was nearing for both of them.

The weekend following their final exams, both Siv and Aurelia managed to get monumentally drunk on a pub crawl they had unadvisedly joined with friends from school. That night, at Siv’s inebriated insistence that she finally find herself a proper boyfriend, Aurelia had flirted heavily with Kevin, a good-looking if somewhat vacuous student from the nearby academy.

By then, the memory of the stranger’s kiss at the fun fair was fading fast and, after a few hours, Aurelia had agreed to go back to Kevin’s house, only for him to stumble as they made their way to his car, hand in hand. He fell badly on his wrist, breaking it, and had to go to A and E, which put a dampener on any further activities of a sexual nature.

Aurelia was beginning to think her love life was cursed. Or, thinking of some of the more lucky escapes she’d had in her teens, that maybe she had some kind of guardian angel. She quickly dismissed the idea, despite that odd feeling she’d had for some time now that she was being watched. It was unnerving, but every time she looked around to investigate there was no one to be seen.

And then the letter arrived.

In a thick, brown envelope that screamed bureaucracy it fell onto the mat below the door’s flap with a heavy thud alongside the usual assortment of household bills, a couple of magazines and a handful of circulars.

Aurelia was in the first-floor bathroom brushing her teeth. She heard Laura’s steps in the hall and her customary grunt as she bent down to pick up the mail. Her godmother was suffering from arthritis in her joints and, these days, her movements were all too often punctuated by sighs and sounds of mild protest at the way her body was reacting to her physical needs.

Laura was a decade older than her godfather, John, and Aurelia had always been amazed that two people who seemed so different had managed to stick together for so long. John was a serious, practical man who worked as an architect on dull corporate building projects in the City of London. Whereas Laura was an artist who specialised in blowing glass into delicate birdlike shapes, as far removed from the sturdy steel structures that John designed as one could imagine.

They had met twenty years earlier on the Tube, when Laura had been carrying one of her creations to an exhibition and had dropped it at his feet where the glass had shattered into a million pieces. Their hands had touched as Laura had knelt down to gather up the fragments and John had tried to help her. The rest, as they often said, was history. And, despite the apparent contrast in their personalities, they remained as much in love now as they had been the first year they met.

Aurelia had never known her own parents. She was only a baby when they both died in an accident in America and she had been raised by John, who had been a friend of her father’s at university, and his wife Laura, who was unable to conceive children of her own.

Aurelia was grateful to them for taking her in, but despite their kindless she had never quite managed to think of them as Mum and Dad, and so their relationship remained a strange mix of affection and distance.

Her godparents had always been somewhat furtive about the details of her parents’ deaths and eventually Aurelia presumed they simply didn’t know anything more. So she stopped asking questions, but she never stopped wondering what sort of people her parents had been, exactly how they had died and whether or not she was growing into their likeness.

There was a shuffle of paper from the hall and then Laura’s voice.

‘Aurelia dear, there’s some mail for you.’

She rinsed her mouth and acknowledged her godmother’s shout out. In all likelihood something totally unimportant. Aurelia couldn’t remember the last time she’d received any actual mail in the post. All her communications were through email and text messages, with Siv and the other friends in their circle, and she had no recollection of setting pen to paper aside from sending the occasional birthday card. She rushed back to her bedroom, slipped on a pair of jeans and ran downstairs.

Laura had moved to the kitchen where she was busying herself with preparing breakfast. Gentle hissing sounds from the coffee maker were punctuated by the steady rhythm of the wooden spoon turning in the pan, stirring the porridge oats to keep them from burning. A soft light fell through the large bay windows and lit up the jars of marmalade and pickles that were stacked on wooden shelves alongside the larder. John was still upstairs reading in bed, his customary weekend indulgence.

The mail had been picked up from the mat and the letter addressed to her was propped up on the dining table, resting against a large jug of tulips, imported from the hot houses in Holland and just beginning to open, their pale-pink buds unfurling with surprising swiftness and adding an early spring note to the late winter morning.

Aurelia peered down at the envelope. It was indeed her name typed in a traditional font across the rectangular white label.

Rather than tear it open right there and then, she decided to take it up to her room and read it at her leisure. Sitting cross-legged on her bed, she carefully inserted her tweezers into the corner of the brown envelope and ripped it open.

It was a letter from a lawyer asking her to attend a meeting at the firm’s offices in London’s Inns of Court at the earliest possible opportunity. Aurelia’s first reaction was that they had sent the letter to the wrong person and she checked over the envelope again, studiously scrutinising her name and the address, but there was no mistaking the details. Reading the brief text a second time, she was struck by the fact that it required her to visit the lawyers on her own and that she should not be accompanied. There was no explanation of the circumstances or a reason.

She Googled the company and it appeared to be legitimate, with a website listing partners and associates with a plethora of initials following their names.

Aurelia instinctively resisted informing John and Laura of the letter’s contents and pretended to them when asked later by her godmother that it had only been junk mail.

‘I really haven’t a clue what it might be about,’ she told Siv when they met up later that day in a small cafe on the seafront where they often whiled the time away when they were idle. Harry was up in the Midlands with the fun fair and unable to come down to the seaside to join them as he often tried to do. ‘Why don’t you phone them?’ Siv suggested. ‘Ask them why?’

‘They wouldn’t be working on a Saturday,’ Aurelia pointed out to her friend.

‘Maybe they are. Have a go.’

The number went unanswered, as she expected.

All weekend Aurelia attempted to ignore the curious summons. They went to see the latest Michael Fassbender movie at the local Cineworld, which failed to please Siv as the actor, whom she doted on, kept his shirt on throughout, but the appearance of the letter kept on nagging at Aurelia’s mind.

As soon as their Monday-morning classes broke up for lunch, she dashed to the sports field where she knew she would be guaranteed some privacy and rang the law firm in London. She was unable to speak to the lawyer who had signed the letter and was told by his female assistant that the first available slot for a meeting was the following week on the Tuesday. She was not in a position to inform Aurelia what the matter was about and she would be advised in due time. Aurelia accepted the appointment immediately, even though she knew it would mean her having to play truant from school that day.

The whole week and the following weekend dragged on as she tried to blank the trip to London from her thoughts and made an effort to concentrate on her final batch of coursework which was due just a month or so away. She had good predictions and had already been accepted by a couple of decent universities depending on her results, although the thought of her further education failed to fire her. She had given much thought to the subject laying in bed at night while seeking the solace of sleep and come to the conclusion that, unlike most of her classmates, she simply lacked any career ambition and the prospect of moving away from home and being more independent was not much of an incentive.