A Room With No Natural Light Read online

  A

  Room

  With

  No

  Natural

  Light

  Douglas Lindsay

  Published by Blasted Heath, 2015

  copyright © 2015 Douglas Lindsay

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without permission of the author.

  Douglas Lindsay has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cover design by JT Lindroos

  Visit Douglas Lindsay at:

  www.blastedheath.com

  ISBN: 978-1-908688-79-8

  Version 2-1-3

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  About This Book

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  Also by Douglas Lindsay

  About Blasted Heath

  About This Book

  It’s a long, hot summer in the south of England and Pitt’s small vineyard is in crisis. The bank’s chasing debts and government inspectors are snooping around. Yet Pitt is drawn further and further into Yuan Ju’s dark and disturbing world. How far is he prepared to go to help her?

  Pitt’s wife looks on, nervous and insecure, impotent with fear, while her mother watches everything, biding her time. She will be not fearful, but vengeful.

  And walking through the vines in near silence, Pitt must address the most perplexing question of all. Where are the birds? Just a few dead at first, but soon the skies are empty.

  1

  He watched the movement of her hands. Steam rose from the pan on the stove. There were no other sounds but the noise of the bubbling water and the knife cutting into the wood.

  Usually by this time he would have been outside, walking up and down the vines. He checked them at this time every morning. Today, he didn’t move.

  Her fingers were pale brown and thin. Delicate. The sun was streaming in from the window behind her, the morning was warm. As always at this time of day, at this time of year, the dust particles hung in the air. The dust particles that so offended his wife, as if they were an indication of the house being unclean.

  If she knew he was watching her, she did not let on, did not turn. It was her first day, and she knew to keep her head down and get on with the job. She had to prepare lunch for seven people.

  He watched her slice the onion and finely chop the garlic. She did not use a garlic press. She washed her fingers, rubbing soap into them. She wiped down the board and took a white bag from the fridge. She stood at the board and removed three large cuts of pork, which she began to cut into strips.

  Pitt looked down at his empty coffee cup. He had finished it nearly half an hour earlier. He wondered what Daisy would think if she came back and found him still there.

  Halfway through chopping the pork she stopped, reached over and turned off the gas. She blew a strand of black hair away from her eyes and rubbed her wrist across her forehead, the point of the knife held away from her face. She cut up the remainder of the pork.

  Pitt wondered what she was preparing. Daisy always made sandwiches. If she laid some crisps or nuts on the table, she thought she was being experimental.

  She lifted the board and pushed the dissected pork into a glass bowl. She walked over to the shopping bag with which she had arrived that morning, and removed two small bottles, then proceeded to sprinkle soy and fish sauce over the meat. She turned the pork over, coating it. Her fingers gripping the bowl seemed strong.

  Pitt swallowed. He stood to get himself a glass of water from the fridge.

  *

  It was a large, open farmhouse kitchen, space in the middle for a table, windows on three walls. It held them there, the four players, captive in its claustrophobic silence. Pitt, taciturn and brave; Yuan Ju, poetic in her movements; Daisy, neurotic, scared, continually agitated; and Mrs Cromwell, malicious and unforgiving – the one who, in the end, would wield the sword.

  2

  Daisy had not been well named.

  The name Daisy speaks of summer. Daisy is a little girl running through a field, laughing. Daisy is a young woman on a bike on a May morning on her way to college. Daisy is a warm afternoon, birds singing, small clouds of anonymous insects hovering a few feet above the grass. Daisy is light and clarity, energy and warmth.

  Daisy Pitt’s fifty-one years had so far passed without being blessed by a single summer. Sunny days did not happen in Daisy Pitt’s life. Sunny days were too hot, just as rainy days were too wet, cloudy days too grey, windy days too blowy, frosty days too cold.

  A psychiatrist might have enjoyed himself trying to establish whether Daisy had been born insecure, or whether she’d had insecurity thrust upon her. But she was not the type to give herself to the medical profession unnecessarily; she did not open up to anyone.

  Her parents had not been unhappy, but they’d had little pleasure. They had married at a time when it was what people did, when there had still been a formality to it. Love and freedom of choice had been secondary to post-war necessity. They had to wait over ten years for their one child, and ten years later Daisy’s father had died of cancer. She had lived with her mother ever since.

  No man is black or white, all good or all bad. They are all shades of grey, and Daisy’s father had been as complex and shadowed as anyone. By turns happy and melancholic, trapped and free, caring and angry. However, not long after his death, the bad memories began to drift away, so that all Daisy remembered were the good times, the loving moments. The smiles and the hugs, the presents and the small cakes secretly given behind her mother’s back. She forgot the times he’d ignored her, the times he’d been too busy, the times he’d scolded her because he’d been unhappy rather than for what Daisy had done.

  And in the end all she had were the happy memories, and a mother who was bitter at being left to raise a child on her own.

  Her mother had retreated into criticism and over-analysis. Every aspect of Daisy’s life picked apart; praise rarely awarded, disapproval given gladly. Daisy had not thrived. Her mother had only a talent for dragging her daughter down into her own wretched world.

  *

  Mrs Cromwell was washing dishes; some of which Daisy had already washed.

  ‘I thought you were going to get someone in?’ said Mrs Cromwell.

  ‘I will,’ said Daisy.

  Daisy was four different people. Timid and insecure with her mother; bitter and in
secure with her husband; wary and insecure with everyone else; on her own, lost.

  ‘How long are you going to say that?’

  Daisy did not reply. She was looking in cupboards, writing a list of seasonal vegetables and tinned fruit.

  Daisy didn’t want anyone else around the house; she didn’t want to be responsible for them, she didn’t want to have to manage them. If they came in and swept through the house with energy, competence and a sense of duty, her mother would relish the improvement, revelling in every second of telling Daisy how much better things had become since she’d removed herself from the only responsibility she’d had. If the hired help was awful and disinterested, her mother would sneer and Daisy would be forced into a confrontation with the under-achieving new member of staff.

  ‘You ought to get someone for the summer,’ said Mrs Cromwell. She placed the plates in the rack with a clatter, as if the noise emphasised her place in the room. She was the noise. She was in charge in her daughter’s house. ‘You can never cope in the summer. I’m too old to always be clearing up after you. I’ll not always be here.’

  Daisy never dreamed of the freedom that might bring. It was too late for freedom. She was going to be trapped, even after her mother was gone.

  ‘I’ll get someone,’ said Daisy.

  ‘You’ve said that before,’ said Mrs Cromwell, a knife dropped in amongst the other cutlery. ‘Maybe you’ll actually do it this time.’

  Later that day, when Daisy returned with the shopping, her mother thankfully taking an afternoon nap, she realised her list had been incomplete and that she’d have to go back out.

  She forgot things, even when she tried to concentrate. Head filled with injustice. On this occasion, blamed her mother for the distraction.

  On her return to the supermarket, she stopped to look at the message board.

  *

  Daisy certainly did not know what it was to be happy, but she did know fear and insecurity, bitterness and boredom, and it was these unattractive qualities that now led her to bring Yuan Ju to the house.

  When her mother was not there, she complained about housework – ironing and cleaning and dirty marks on windows. Mostly, however, she complained about cooking. She complained to her friends and to the men who worked on the vines; occasionally she complained to her husband. When Pitt was drawn to discuss the subject, he would tell her to employ a cook, and Daisy would prevaricate and mutter and change the subject, although not for long. She never complained to her mother, but Mrs Cromwell recognised the doubt and the bitterness.

  The truth was that Daisy did not want another woman in the house. (She did not even contemplate the notion of a male cook.) Having her mother there was enough. She feared the comparison. She feared the extra opinion. She feared her husband falling in love with the other woman.

  One day, they’d be sitting in uncomfortable silence at the kitchen table. He would stare at his mug of tea, and he would tell her that he loved the cook, and that Daisy and her mother would have to leave. Bald and bold and blunt and unfeeling.

  That was some days. Other days, Daisy feared that her cooking was so bad and so unimaginative, that the main duty which she was required to fulfil for her husband was so poorly executed, that he would become fed up with her, even without the temptation of another woman, and would ask her to leave.

  As with most anxiety, this inner concern created barriers between them that would not have been there had she not been consumed by self-doubt in the first place – the self-fulfilling prophecy of insecurity. Yet Pitt was going nowhere, and neither was Daisy. They seemed trapped, until such time as one of them died.

  *

  She stood near the exit of the Co-Operative, looking at the small ads. She glanced over her shoulder, worried that people might be looking at her, wondering what it was she needed. Was it written all over her? Needs Help At Home. Can’t Cope.

  She thought about taking the card down, quickly thrusting it into her handbag, but she worried that someone would notice her. She typed the number into her mobile phone, and put it hurriedly back into her bag. She would call later, when she was alone in the kitchen and there was no chance of her mother walking in on her.

  She drove home wondering what Pitt would think of her employing a cook. She wasn’t sure that she really knew how her husband felt about anything. They never talked. Perhaps occasionally one of them might talk at the other one, usually with Daisy doing the talking; but they never had a conversation. They never exchanged ideas or discussed anything. They never started at a point and talked something through in order to get to another point.

  She wondered if she would be able to specify who the employment agency would send to her home. She needed someone younger, someone who had yet to formulate her own ideas, someone without the confidence to judge her.

  Later that afternoon, when her mother was in front of the television, she made the call. Alone in the kitchen, shoulders hunched with the phone pressed tightly to her ear, as if phoning in a noisy and busy airport terminal; constant glances over her shoulder and through the window.

  3

  conversations with hardyman

  The arguments never seemed to change, yet Pitt found himself having them over and over again, sometimes with Jenkins, sometimes with Daisy; this day, a warm morning in early summer, with his accountant, Hardyman.

  ‘Have you been to Denbies or Three Choirs like I told you?’ said Hardyman, looking up from his lunch.

  Generally, Pitt preferred to meet people over lunch; food and drink punctuated the awkward silences. However, with Hardyman, he felt able to talk.

  ‘No,’ said Pitt bluntly.

  Hardyman took a slow sip of Chablis, then dabbed the corners of his mouth. His actions were not in any way affected. Hardyman had been dabbing the corners of his mouth from the age of five. He lifted his eyes to the surly man across the table.

  ‘Three Choirs is half an hour away. And it’s not like Denbies is in New Zealand. Even you can tackle the M25 every now and again.’

  Pitt had already broken his gaze and was looking back at his lunch.

  ‘These are the people who are making money. Last year you sold every single bottle of wine you’d produced that was ready to sell, and you lost just under fifty grand. What’s going to happen in the years when you don’t sell, when you get a poor yield, when the government slaps another hefty tax on wine and you can’t sell a single bottle?’

  Pitt took another mouthful of steak. The meat was older than usual, took longer to chew. Pitt was happy to chew in silence.

  ‘Diversify, John,’ said Hardyman, ‘or lose the vineyard. The people that survive, the ones who make money... they’re the ones with guests, with tours and coach parties, with accommodation and wine tasting weekends. Did you speak to the web designer yet?’

  Pitt didn’t answer, although it was one of those moments when some part of him smiled inside. Hardyman was constantly buzzing, constantly probing; a boxer with endless jabs.

  ‘Of course not,’ muttered Hardyman darkly. ‘Why would you do anything that might help your situation?’

  ‘Why would I have a website,’ said Pitt eventually, ‘when I sell all the wine as it is, and I’ve no intention of introducing any of these absurd Butlins-type suggestions that you have for the vineyard?’

  ‘It’s not bloody Butlins!’ said Hardyman.

  ‘Hollywood then,’ said Pitt, enjoying baiting him. ‘I don’t know the word, but I’ll tell you what it’s not: anything to do with winemaking. Not one of the vines would be improved by having members of the public walk past it.’

  Hardyman had another ejaculation on his lips, but he swallowed it and turned his head back to his dinner. He liked to get annoyed at his clients, but at night he drove home in his Aston Martin to the former manor house in a small village in Kent and drank wine and ate fish and forgot about all of them.

  ‘You’re bloody lucky you’re not with RBS,’ muttered Hardyman, ‘that’s all I’ll say. You’d have been su
nk by now.’

  Pitt did not answer. Hardyman had said it to him before; Hardyman said it to all his clients, except those who were with RBS, and to those he opined that they’d been lucky not to be with Lloyds TSB.

  ‘Only you,’ said Hardyman, who took great relish in the verbal joust, ‘thinks that if someone walks past a vine wearing a pair of Hush Puppies, the wine will somehow develop a hint of leather upper.’

  Hardyman wore a suit that had cost a little over eight thousand pounds to be hand-tailored in London. Pitt wore a jumper he had bought for ten pounds in a sale at the Edinburgh Woollen Mill three years previously.

  He wondered if Hardyman was going to say that the world was changing.

  ‘The world is changing, John,’ said Hardyman. ‘And you, my friend, are getting left behind.’

  Pitt did not reply and thought once again about how so much conversation was completely unnecessary.

  4

  He woke early. Not long after four-thirty, already light outside. He lay still, his hands clasped on his chest, staring at the ceiling. The curtains were thin, the room was bright. He could not hear Daisy breathe, but at least, he sometimes morosely thought, she had that to her advantage. He never heard her breathe or eat or swallow, as if everything she did happened in a vacuum.

  Were her dreams happy? Did she ever wake feeling positive about the day ahead? Or was she crushed from the very first second?

  His ears became accustomed to the silence, which was when he noticed that there was silence at all. He glanced to the side, at the sleeping form curled beneath the covers, then stood and walked to the curtains. He was wearing a t-shirt and boxer shorts, his erection pressing against the loose cotton.

  He pushed the curtains aside and looked outside. Daisy had left the window open all night; the air was cool. The sun lay low in the sky, the vines looked beautiful, stretching out towards the south. Towards the M4, Daisy had immediately remarked, long ago when they had first looked over the fledgling vineyard. Row upon row of trellises in the style of the Geneva double curtain; endless lines of crosses, now being covered by the summer growth of the vines.