Mistress of Night and Dawn (6 page)

And when she wasn’t thinking back with a bitter sense of yearning to that magical kiss, and the myriad smells and colours it evoked inside her, her thoughts would travel to the idea of seeing America somehow. Her birthplace. She had no particular desire to leave the protective wing of her godparents, who were both pretty relaxed and uncontrolling, but she longed for the fresh energy of younger shores. Aurelia often felt that she didn’t quite fit here in England.

But always her thoughts would drift to the stranger at the fun fair and the feeling of his mouth against hers, and she would sink into her pillows and touch her fingertips to her lips before moving down her body to her nub, where she would try in vain to pretend that the hand that brought her such pleasure was not her own. Deep in her heart, Aurelia could not shake the feeling that he would return to her again, and she feared that if she moved so far away, he might not be able to find her.

‘What should I wear to visit a lawyer?’ she asked Siv over the phone the evening before her appointment. From her top-floor open window she could see the last rays of sunset melting across the horizon and over the cobbled streets and clapboard cottages and a sliver of dark sea to the left. The night air was sharp and invigorating.

‘Something elegant. And simple,’ her friend suggested.

‘My best jeans and the blazer?’ she asked Siv.

‘No. You can’t wear denim. A dress maybe? Shows you’re a serious kind of person.’

She settled for the mauve pencil skirt she had worn for the shotgun wedding of a classmate who had fallen pregnant six months earlier, together with a white silk blouse that screamed demure from six paces. And opted for flat shoes as a concession to comfort. Siv had agreed to cover for her at school; it was a study day and maybe she wouldn’t be missed. She knew, however, she would feel self-conscious all day dressed like that.

The commuter train to the city was full and she hung on to the straps for the whole journey, feeling slightly nauseous in anticipation of her meeting with the lawyer. The carriage ground to a halt and disgorged its human cargo onto the platform and Aurelia felt as if she was being dragged along with the flow, a totally insignificant drop in a vast current of people all racing to their important jobs and morning meetings. She had a whole hour to spare and decided to walk from Liverpool Street Station to Holborn rather than take the tube, first stopping to buy a coffee from the two Italian coffee vendors on Brushfield Street, their sales patter and bright orange umbrella providing the one spot of colour on a grey morning.

Leaving the City behind, the crowds thinned as the rush hour passed and Aurelia’s attention turned to her surroundings, observing the stone walls of the ancient buildings, smooth and pale in stark contrast with the gaudy flower pots that hung from the awnings of the pubs geared for tourists.

Waiting at a set of traffic lights by Holborn Circus, leading down to Fetter Lane, Aurelia paused, holding her dark-green cape coat tight to her chest, watching the traffic and three tall red buses riding bumper to bumper as they crawled along the road, and glimpsed a faint reflection of movement in one of the bus’s windows. She quickly turned round and thought she caught a shadow darting across the corner of a large office block into a side alley, as if fleeing from her quicksilver glance. Her heart fluttered and she accelerated her pace and headed for the Thames, looking back at regular intervals to see if she could spot any anomalies in the milling crowds, but was unable to do so.

She entered the Inns of Court, sprawled like a peaceful oasis in the heart of the urban closeness, and relaxed. A gentle breeze was coasting in from the nearby river and animating the tree branches as she spotted the building she was searching for. A receptionist who looked like a carbon copy of her headmistress noted her name down in a register and led her to a waiting room.

‘Mr Irving is expecting you,’ the older woman said. ‘He shouldn’t be long.’ The airy and brightly lit room was like a doctor’s antechamber but without the traditional well-thumbed collection of out-of-date magazines. A carefully trimmed small bonsai tree sat on a thin glass shelf on the far wall. Aurelia adjusted her tight skirt and tried to compose herself, her eyes darting across the room in an attempt to take in all its details.

The wait was a short one as a middle-aged man in a pin-striped suit, dark-blue shirt, silver tie, red braces and polished black shoes walked in briskly and offered his hand. He was medium height and wore glasses and his grey hair stood in sharp contrast to the rest of his appearance, halfway down to his shoulders, lustrous, combed back, studiously inappropriate for his profession and age.

‘Gwillam Irving,’ he said, his hand firmly shaking hers. His palm was unusually cool to the touch.

‘Aurelia . . .’ she answered. ‘Aurelia Carter.’ She had chosen to use her godparents’ name a few years back, and not her birth name. They had brought her up and been so kind to her it had felt like both an acknowledgement and a vote of thanks.

‘I know,’ the lawyer said and, with his extended arm, indicated for her to follow him.

His office was across from the reception area and so much smaller than she expected, crowded with piles of dossiers, papers and law magazines attracting dust on every surface. He bid her to sit down, after clearing some stray folders from the old leather swivel chair facing his cluttered desk. There was a quaint, benevolent kindness in his smile as he sat and faced her.

He cleared his throat and gazed at Aurelia. ‘I have been instructed to contact you and make you an offer, Miss Carter,’ he said. ‘However, I regret to advise you I will be unable to answer any of the obvious questions that, I am sure, you will wish to ask later, and I apologise in advance. My instructions are quite clear.’

Aurelia, puzzled, remained silent.

‘You have a very generous benefactor,’ Gwillam Irving said, sitting ramrod in his own chair.

‘A benefactor?’

‘I think that’s the best way of putting it,’ he answered.

‘I’m not sure what you mean,’ Aurelia replied.

‘Irving, Irving and Irving, of which I am a senior partner, have been retained to set up a trust fund to be established in your name, which runs to a not inconsiderable sum, if I may say so. The principal will be available to you in full on your twenty-first birthday, although adequate amounts can be disbursed to you beforehand on certain conditions pertaining to your continuing your higher education.’

Aurelia sat silently, processing the information.

As she was about to open her mouth and begin asking a litany of questions, the grey-haired lawyer continued.

‘I am unable to reveal the identity of our client who has requested to remain anonymous.’ He awaited her reaction.

Her mind was in a whirl. There was just no one she could think of who could have come up with such a scheme. Her godparents were always careful with money, but they only had a small pot of savings, and she had no other relatives she was aware of.

‘How much?’ she queried.

The sum he quoted silenced her for a moment.

Seeing her lost for words, Gwillam Irving added, ‘The interest alone, and we will be careful to arrange for the best possible interest to accrue until your twenty-first, will suffice to cover your cost of living through university and much more, I can assure you.’

‘This is crazy,’ Aurelia protested.

‘There are two important conditions attached, I am obliged to point out – and I will of course provide you with a written copy of the proposed arrangements before we part – and they are that you begin your university education, in a place of your choice, before the aforementioned twenty-first birthday and also that you . . .’ He hesitated. Aurelia stared hard at him. ‘. . . that you should not enter into marriage before that date.’

Aurelia felt her throat tighten. This was all so absurd. Not that she had any intention of entering into wedlock for the foreseeable future; there was not even a man, a boy, anywhere in her life.

‘Were any of those conditions broken, the trust fund set up in your name would automatically be rescinded, I must make it clear.’

Her mind was crowded with questions but she already knew each and everyone of them would be pointless and that the lawyer would not prove forthcoming.

Irving talked her through the minutiae of the fund that would now be hers and the arrangements awaiting her agreement for the way it would be set up. She signed pages and pages of legal documents in a daze, not even bothering to read most of the details.

The lawyer escorted her to the door of the chambers and shook her hand.

‘Congratulations, Miss Carter. You are a very lucky young woman.’

The breeze from the river had lifted, the leaves on the trees dotted geometrically along the Inns of Court barely fluttered now, and the whole world felt unreal to Aurelia.

She retraced her steps to the train station, moving in a daze through the busy London streets and crossed into the City. On the corner of Bishopsgate, she felt a pang of hunger in her stomach and stopped at one of the fruit stalls that dotted the street and picked up a punnet of strawberries. As she did so, she once again felt someone’s eyes on her, drilling into the back of her neck. She abruptly turned round, submerged by that unsettling if illogical feeling she was being followed or watched. But there was nothing she could focus on. She bit into one of the plump red fruits, still observing the passers-by with uncommon attention. This was real life, not a thriller, no one could be following her, surely. Why would they?

She tucked the remainder of the berries into her handbag and walked down the steps into the train station.

Her train to the coast was already on the platform and half empty. Aurelia settled in and reviewed the morning in her mind in an attempt to make sense of it all. There was an announcement on the Tannoy, the carriage’s doors closed and the train rumbled off. She glanced through the window and noticed the dark silhouette of a man standing at the entrance to the platform, receding in the distance with every passing second.

Aurelia looked away distractedly, and hunted through her purse for a tissue. The tips of her fingers were still red, stained with the juice from her strawberry.

Aurelia began to spend more and more time walking along the estuary. She had not yet told her godparents of her new wealth. Perhaps it was her way of clinging to the past, knowing that change was now inevitable. Siv often joined her, and it became their regular Sunday-afternoon jaunt. They would walk along the waterfront to Old Leigh and stop for fish and chips and an ice cream in a cone and sit together looking out at the white sails that dotted the gentle waves and the thread of smoke that bloomed into the sky from the Canvey oil refinery across the water.

They talked about the future, but never with any particular certainty. The topic often turned to Aurelia’s trust fund, and what she might do with it. Siv tossed possibilities into the air at random like a juggler.

‘You could buy a zoo,’ she said. ‘And become a lion tamer. Or a big yacht,’ she added, ‘and we could sail to Madagascar. I’ll be your first mate, of course.’

Aurelia paused with her chip halfway to her mouth and pursed her lips, considering these fantastic new suggestions, never quite sure whether her friend was being serious.

‘I’m not allowed the money, though, until I finish my education.’

‘You’re allowed to spend some of it on your education, right?’

‘Yes, that’s what the lawyer said. Part of it is for university and then once I’ve finished that, I’m allowed the rest, to do what I like with.’

‘Well then. You’ll have to have an extra extravagant education. The School of Rock? Space Camp? Why not somewhere abroad?’

Aurelia shrugged. ‘I suppose so. I like it here, though. I’d miss the sea.’

Siv sighed. ‘The money is wasted on you,’ she said. ‘You couldn’t care less, could you?’

‘Well, what would you do with it?’

‘Circus school. There’s one in America. But, even if I could afford it, my parents would never let me. They want me to do something practical. My mum thinks I should be a nurse.’

Aurelia snorted. ‘You’d make the worst nurse in the world. Ginger could be a nurse. He already is, isn’t he?’ She glanced pointedly down at Siv’s palms and knees, which bore the proof of multiple falls from her makeshift trapeze.

Siv ignored the jibe. ‘Why don’t you come with me? You’ve always said that you wanted to go to America. See where you were born.’

Aurelia fell silent.

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake,’ Siv said, guessing correctly that her friend’s thoughts were still fixated on the stranger from the fun fair. ‘You didn’t even see what he looked like, never mind get his number.’ She kicked a rock into the ocean, hard, to emphasise her frustration.

It was Ginger, in the end, who unknown to either of the girls suggested to Siv’s parents that Siv might have a chance at entry to the School of Performing Arts in Berkeley. Though she was new to swinging on a trapeze, years of forced ballet and tap dancing lessons had given her the necessary prerequisites and if she could come up with a unique enough act for the audition, she might scoop a scholarship place.

Ginger had given up the fascination that he had first held for Aurelia the moment he had seen Siv take her first sip of hot chocolate, leaving a cocoa moustache on her top lip. He had leaned forward and kissed it from her mouth, and when all of his senses were overwhelmed by the taste of cinnamon and spices, he was smitten, and he had silently agreed with Aurelia, who had said that the drink tasted of love.

Siv was the girl for Ginger. There was an essential vitality in her that attracted him, a magical quality to her physical movement, as if she were part person and part sprite. He suspected that if Siv were cut open, doctors would find that her blood ran hotter and redder than the average human. But he sensed her restlessness, and he knew that all the things he loved about her would be the things that would take her away from him. She was far too full of life to spend the rest of it in a drowsy village by the coast.

Aurelia was the opposite. There was a coolness to her, a softness and languor that was evident in everything from the pallor of her skin to the auburn tone of her hair that ran like water straight down her back. The two of them together were like Yin and Yang.