The Au Pair by Emma Rous is a slightly Gothic psychological thriller that focuses on one woman’s suspicion that she might not be physically related to her own family. The premise is excellent and while I kept turning pages well into the night, I found that when I finished the book, I was only slightly satisfied with the resolution. Part of that is because the final reveals are executed a little clumsily. The other part is that aside from the heroine, Seraphine, this book is mostly about people doing awful things to each other. So I was left thinking, “Huh, well, that was a bunch of shitty people doing shitty things.”

I read Gothics by Victoria Holt and Phyllis Whitney before I turned to romance, so in some ways The Au Pair was like coming home. Our heroine, Seraphine Mayes, is clearing out her father’s possessions after he dies in an accident when she comes across a startling photograph. If you put air quotes around “accident,” you’d be correct.

Seraphine is one of three Mayes siblings: she has a twin brother named Danny, and an older brother Edwin. They are part of a well-off family that has a beachside property named Summerbourne on the Norfolk coast, where they spent much of their childhood. Their mother, Ruth, committed suicide by jumping from a cliffside the same day she gave birth to Seraphine and Danny at their ancestral home.

The aforementioned photograph is of Ruth holding a baby (we aren’t sure if it’s Danny or Seraphine), with Edwin standing nearby. A second photo reveals Edwin with a young woman, his au pair Laura, who left under mysterious circumstances the same day.

The photos get Seraphine’s mind spinning. Why does her mother look so happy in that photo when she’d go on to commit suicide hours later? Why is only one baby in the shot? Why did Laura leave that very day and never come back?

This book is divided into two parts: Seraphine’s search for answers in the present day, and Laura’s recounting of what happened at Summerbourne in the early nineties.

I love a good mystery and The Au Pair sets up the premise of “WTF happened that summer” beautifully. Laura’s recounting of events include a bizarre tension in the Mayes family, with Ruth vacillating from an involved and present mother and wife, to a woman who seemed distant and conflicted. I kept picturing Ruth as the mother from The Haunting of Hill House, a woman struggling so valiantly to maintain the life she built while at the same time fighting off demons–either literal or in the form of undiagnosed/treated mental illness.

Laura feels like an outsider at Summerbourne; she’s of a different class than the Mayes’ and she experiences that keenly. Mirroring her discomfort, Seraphine is beginning to feel like an outsider among her own family, and her search for Laura and for answers about her mother’s suicide only perpetuate that feeling.

In one scene, she tracks down a former neighbor, Alex, who was close to her parents and was present that summer, and his response is not what she expected:

When Alex Kaimal finally swings around to look at me, we stand facing each other wordlessly. Cold needles prickle down my neck and arms. His frown deepens as he stares at me. The girl looks curiously from one of us to the other.

“Can we help you?” she asks me. I can’t tear my gaze from his face.

“I’m Seraphine Mayes,” I manage to say. “I’m Dominic and Ruth Mayes’ daughter. I think you were a friend of my parents.”

His demeanor changes then. His eyes widen, he draws in two deep quick breaths, and he takes a step backward, holding his hands up as if to defend himself.

“Dad?” his daughter asks, but he doesn’t take his eyes off me.

“You can’t be,” he says eventually. “You can’t be. Ruth died.”

I step forward, warily.

“I know. She died on the day I was born,” I say.

He starts to shake his head, slowly at first and then more violently.

“No. No, it’s impossible,” he says.

“Dad?” his daughter says again, and he reaches for her hand without breaking eye contact with me.

“We need to go,” he says, taking another step backward.

“My brother Edwin remembers you,” I say.

An expression of pain distorts his face.

“Why do you say it’s impossible?” I ask.

He shakes his head, his mouth slightly open, no sound emerging.

“Have you been in contact with Laura?” I ask. “Did you send her a letter?”

“Laura?” he blurts. “No. What?”

Then he regains some composure and takes a step toward me, and then another, his eyes stretched wide, his face thrust forward.

“Who are you?” he demands, and I’m convinced that at any moment he’s going to snarl at me. I stumble backward. The young woman tugs at his hand, pulling him away.

“Dad, stop it. We need to go. Please, let’s just go,” she says.

He relaxes slightly and examines me all the way down to my feet and back up again in a swift moment.

“I don’t know who you are,” he says, his  voice gravelly,  “and I don’t want to talk to you. Stay away from me. Stay away from both of us.”

They cling to each other as they hurry away from me, crossing the car park and climbing into a car. Several men and women have stopped outside the building are eyeing me curiously. I’m shaking. Impossible, he said. It’s impossible that I’m my parents’ child. The conviction that this man is right claws at me, firing off the same three words over and over in a staccato rhythm at the back of my brain. Who am I?

A sense of otherness or wrongness is a staple of the Gothic genre, as is the ancestral home, and the innocent woman in over her head. As I read The Au Pair I realized how these themes are deeply tied to class and to wealth. I didn’t pick up on it when I was younger, reading those Victoria Holt novels, but it was glaringly obvious in this novel.

Seraphine’s anxieties are partly tied to (potentially) not being related to a family of privilege. When she learns that her twin, Danny, will inherit Summerbourne and not her, she’s devastated because it’s always felt like home and she assumed it was her birthright. While I sympathize with her fears of not being related to her family, and her fears about her father lying to her for her entire life, I found myself less sympathetic to the pain of not inheriting a giant beach house.  Similarly I don’t think anyone in the family really had financial concerns regarding, you know, getting back to work after their dad died, and the material privilege that the Mayes children enjoyed made their problems less relatable to me. I am aware that people of any background can feel a sense of distorting otherness or exclusion from their families, and I’m not dismissing Seraphine’s angst; I just found her other concerns to be less dire than I think they were intended to be.

In contrast, Laura’s discomfort at being of a different social class and financial background than the family she works for was explored more thoroughly. She is a guest in their lives, never really fitting in, even when she becomes inextricably entangled in their messes. Sometimes Ruth treats her like a friend and confidant, only to put her firmly “in her place” when she feels annoyed with Laura. Prior to this I’d never really considered how socio-economic difference is used to set a Gothic heroine apart from the people around her, but I think it’s something I’ll be more aware of as I continue to read this genre.

Thoughts on otherness and privilege aside, the real reason that The Au Pair wasn’t a slam-dunk success for me was the ending. Somehow the resolution to all this mystery (both in the present and in the nineties) was exactly what I saw coming and ALSO unnecessarily complicated. The execution of the big reveal(s) was not great.

Also, the ending is entirely dependent on most of the characters doing pretty awful things. Seraphine and her siblings are exempt because they were kids (or literally just born) but everyone else from the nineties section of the book messed up pretty significantly. So while I felt for Seraphine, I really didn’t care very much about the consequences for the rest of them, which made the nineties section of the book less engaging.

I love Gothic mysteries and I love psychological thrillers, so I’m not disappointed I picked up The Au Pair. It certainly had me thinking about the gothic genre in new ways. The premise was excellent, but the end was a let down, and unless you’re a die-hard for the genre, this is probably a better library hold than a buy.