A Room With No Natural Light Read online

  The quiet of morning. Nothing. He would not expect insects before six o’clock, but where were the birds? That was the sound – or complete lack of it – that had roused him from his bed.

  He looked at the trees near the house, and down over the vines. Up into the early morning sky, a hollow blue. There were no birds. There should be swallows and blackbirds, the rapid-fire chirrup of the chaffinch, the cooing of a pigeon. He woke to it every morning. There was nothing.

  He looked over to the west, wondering if there was a storm coming, but the sky was clear of cloud. Maybe it was coming later. He would say to Jenkins.

  Then he heard the boxwood flute of a male blackbird, sitting on a post nearby, the first of the day to call attention to himself. He listened for a few seconds, could not see the bird. There would be others. He would keep an eye on the weather, maybe would not mention it to Jenkins.

  He turned back to the room. Daisy slept in her usual sepulchral silence. He glanced at the small clock on the bedside table and decided that this was him up for the day. Into the bathroom. First pee of the morning and his erection left with it. Cold water on his hands and face. Rinsed and spat. Back through the bedroom, acquiring a pair of jeans as he went, down the stairs, walking slowly into the kitchen.

  He stopped. Yuan Ju was already there. So far that morning he had not given her a thought, although now that she was there, he realised that he’d dreamt about her. She was standing with her back to him, at the position she had occupied most of the previous day; beside the sink, preparing food.

  The evening meal had been delicious; a rich variety of flavours that he had not known before. It tasted strange after years of Daisy’s cooking. No one had said anything. Mrs Cromwell had not touched it, noisily making herself some toast and butter. Daisy had eaten without a word. The two lads who’d worked on into late afternoon – Tate and Blain – had joined them in awkward silence.

  Mrs Cromwell’s toast had been an act of chastisement against her daughter. Pitt knew that Daisy’s silence had been borne of her own insecurity, as she was the one who had hired Yuan Ju in the first place. She had not finished the meal either. The three men had eaten everything, they had all enjoyed it; but no one had said anything. The atmosphere, with the unfamiliar presence at the sink and the dragons at the table, had not permitted conversation.

  Pitt had wanted to tell Yuan Ju that he’d enjoyed it; that it had reminded him of the depth of a wonderful vintage after years of drinking cheap table wine. He had placed his empty plate beside Ju and said nothing.

  Mrs Cromwell had noticed the empty plate gesture as if Pitt had run his hand over Ju’s buttocks. Yuan Ju had washed the dishes.

  Pitt poured himself a glass of water, then filled the kettle. Yuan Ju had given a little start at realising there was someone else in the room, but did not turn. The air was cool from the open kitchen window, the sun still behind the trees that surrounded the farmhouse. The cafetière was on the worktop to the side of where Yuan Ju was preparing breakfast. Pitt watched her for a second, wondering what she was doing, then realised she was cutting up nuts and dried fruit, mixing them with oats.

  He hesitated. The only way to get the cafetière was to ask Yuan Ju to pass it to him, or to briefly stand next to her. Both options seemed awkward, the latter possibly rude without excusing himself. He couldn’t speak.

  He moved slowly, so that she would be aware that he was approaching, and she moved slightly to her left to accommodate him. He reached for the cafetière, and for the briefest moment they were standing next to each other. She stopped cutting the apricots; he paused for a second with his hand on the small black, one-cup coffee maker. Both of them looked down; no acknowledgement.

  She could smell him, the warmth of morning, a real scent before he had been showered in hint of mint or Madagascan sunset. He breathed in, closed his eyes briefly as he did so. He could feel her as much as smell the scent of her; an encompassing presence, encircling him; a warm caressing of his skin.

  He lifted the cafetière and turned away. The kettle rumbled on the stove; a heavy metal kettle that took a long time to boil. He stood with his back to Yuan Ju, waiting for it. He could hear small clicks of the knife. He wondered what age she was. He found it impossible to tell. Just as likely to be thirty-five as twenty; it was something on which he had never had any judgement.

  She was at least twenty years younger than him; maybe thirty, maybe thirty-five. Attraction, to him, seemed impossible. But it wasn’t just an attraction.

  The kettle started to boil. Pitt gave a small start; hadn’t realised that he had been standing there so long. He turned. Yuan Ju was gone, breakfast laid out in a series of small bowls. He looked around the large farmhouse kitchen, a trace of her by the door through to the laundry room. He watched the door, turned back to the spitting kettle.

  He sat at the table, working his way through three cups of coffee. At the beginning, he thought of Yuan Ju, wondering when she would return, wondering what she was now doing. He wanted to go and take a look, to stand and watch her at work. Instead, he sat and stared at the table, eyes not moving from the marks on the old pale wood.

  Finally, after having been awake for over an hour, he began to think about work. A brief thought about what Hardyman had said, but they both knew that Pitt never listened to his advice. He didn’t consider himself bloody-minded, but he had been in the business for over thirty years, and he wasn’t going to take advice on viticulture from an accountant. Was not self-aware enough to acknowledge that he never took advice from anyone.

  By the time Yuan Ju returned to the kitchen, Pitt was standing under the shower.

  5

  Fried rice with beef. Most of the guys joked about it, like they were eating at a Chinese restaurant. A series of numbers filled the air. Mostly Yuan Ju ignored them, but she glanced over her shoulder a couple of times at Pitt. She wondered what he thought of it, but every time she looked he seemed to be eating, so she presumed he liked it.

  Mrs Cromwell had taken herself off for the day, leaving a stray and bitter comment about needing to go out for lunch. Daisy picked at her food long enough that she finished it. She never spoke.

  When the men returned to the vines, all the food had been finished. Pitt thought he might stay and drink tea. He told himself he wanted tea, even though he never drank tea in the afternoon. He didn’t like to admit that he wanted to watch Yuan Ju clear up. He wanted to look at her hands, the strength in her fingers as she removed the empty plates and bowls from the table. He wanted to be able to look into her eyes without her seeing him.

  But Daisy didn’t move from the table, so Pitt did.

  *

  ‘Where did you find her?’

  Pitt heard the question but didn’t want to answer. Ju had been in his head most of the day. Even when not thinking about her directly, she had been there on the sidelines, on the periphery of thought, as if standing looking in on his other thoughts. In two days she had become a constant presence. For the first time that afternoon he had looked at his watch to see how long it would be before they would be returning to the kitchen to eat dinner; how long until he saw her again, until her slender arm reached out to place the plate of food in front of him.

  Pitt didn’t understand. He had long ago shut his emotions down. He never thought about women; neither romantically nor sexually. Not in any context. He had a wife, and every now and again they had sex, but not often. It had been years, even decades, since he had thought about women in any way other than as a group of people who just happened to be there. He was no misogynist; for how can you hate something that you don’t even notice?

  He thought that there was no romance in his life, although his love of his vines, the care and attention he paid to the wine, the warmth and passion with which he invested every enterprise, from planting a new vine to tasting the finished product, the dedication and pleasure he had taken from watching his young vineyard mature into a producer of a fine English wine, was full of romance and jouisance;
a joy of life and work that never, ever reached the surface.

  ‘Daisy found her,’ he said. He stood and looked up at the sky. He held a small dead bird in his hands. He didn’t want to talk about Yuan Ju, although he knew there was no work to be discussed. He stared at the pale blue sky above as if he might find the answer to the mystery of the dead blackbird if he looked long enough.

  Jenkins laughed.

  ‘It’ll be like going to the Peking Palace every day,’ he said.

  Pitt pointed away to the west, slipped the bird into his coat pocket. He would put it in the bin when he got back. ‘Cloud coming in, but it’s not going to rain. Not today. Another few days and we’ll start to need it. Just a little.’

  Jenkins shook his head and smiled. He knew that Pitt would never be drawn.

  ‘She’s nice,’ said Jenkins. ‘Looking, I mean. Nice looking. Some of these Chinese birds, you know...’

  Pitt glanced rudely at him, hoping it would be enough, then looked back at the sky. South this time, to see what the sun was doing.

  ‘Nothing to look at, you know, some of them. But her, she’s nice. Something about her.’

  Pitt turned his back, jealous that someone else had noticed.

  Maybe they all had. Maybe they were all talking about her. He looked down over the land to see how many of the other guys he could see. None of them were in sight. Maybe they were all sitting in the kitchen, taking a break, drinking cups of tea and chatting quietly to the new hired help.

  ‘I need to run up to London,’ said Pitt. ‘Need to talk to Oxford Street.’

  He turned and walked away. Jenkins didn’t say anything. Watched his back. Couldn’t read Pitt. Couldn’t talk to him either, but he tried sometimes.

  6

  conversations with hardyman

  A small restaurant in Mayfair, the kind of place where they only went when it was acknowledged beforehand that Hardyman would be paying. Beautifully presented first courses, insubstantial content compensated for by depth of taste; second courses of subtlety; a main course with potatoes weaved extravagantly into European sauces, cream and olive oil, coriander and chickpeas. They ate well and talked like generals.

  ‘It’s up to you, if you want to be left in the 1990s,’ said Hardyman, waving a fork. He usually followed the phrase it’s up to you with earnest arguments on why Pitt was wrong. ‘But it’s not just about business, the wine business, any kind of business. Society itself, John, is undergoing the kind of dramatic tsunami that hit the West in the 60’s, and none of us know how it will sort itself out.’

  The word tsunami, thought Pitt, had swept through society like a tsunami since the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004.

  ‘The Internet, cell phones, apps, Twitter, the whole shebang... no one knows where it’s going or how far it’s taking us all, but it’s changing everything. The whole fabric of life, the interaction of society.’

  Pitt had a plate of beef in rich red wine, with chic morsels of mashed potato before him. Almost finished. He continued to eat.

  ‘You didn’t even change with the 60s, did you?’ said Hardyman. ‘An ancient artefact, preserved in aspic for future generations to stare at. When you die, they’ll put you in a glass case.’

  ‘I was two in 1960,’ said Pitt. ‘D’you think I should have been smoking pot and sleeping with women in Camden by the summer of ‘66?’

  ‘No, but you could have been doing it by the summer of ‘76. The 60s weren’t a blip; things didn’t return to normal when they were all over. They changed society and everyone in it. Except you. And now it’s happening again.’

  Hardyman sucked up a long, thin coil of pasta and said, ‘They make television documentaries about people like you. And the people in them always look sad and absurd.’

  ‘I’m thinking of doing a green harvest this year,’ said Pitt. ‘As my accountant, I thought I ought to run that by you.’

  Hardyman paused with his fork halfway to his mouth.

  ‘No one green harvests in England.’

  Pitt placed his knife and fork on the edge of his plate. Took another small sip of wine; a simple Pinot Grigiot, which they had allowed the waiter to recommend.

  ‘You green harvest...’ began Hardyman, then he spluttered into his food. Took a much larger swallow of wine and said, ‘does anyone green harvest in England?’

  ‘I’ve not checked on their websites,’ replied Pitt glibly. ‘Maybe I’ll do that when I get home.’

  ‘You never go on the bloody Internet.’

  The waiter appeared beside the table and stood with his legs pressed together.

  ‘Can I take your plate, sir?’

  Pitt answered with his eyebrows. Hardyman looked perturbed, as he always did when a plate was cleared away before one of the diners at the table had finished.

  ‘Do you know anyone who never uses the Internet?’ he said to the waiter. ‘I mean, anyone under seventy.’

  The waiter shook his head as he lifted Pitt’s plate.

  ‘I think it’s rather rare these days, sir,’ he said.

  Hardyman pointed a fork in the direction of Pitt, crammed a last mouthful in and placed his cutlery on the plate, gesturing for the waiter to take it with him.

  ‘You will wither and die,’ said Hardyman, as the waiter walked away, his legs only slightly less attached to each other. ‘Green harvest,’ he then blurted out scornfully. ‘Are you going to sell this year’s at fifty pounds a bottle?’

  ‘Twenty,’ said Pitt softly.

  ‘Who’s going to buy that? John...’ and he let the sentence drift off, and shook his head for all the world like he was talking to an incorrigible child.

  ‘It’ll be a wine worth paying twenty pounds for,’ said Pitt.

  *

  On the way home on the train he explained green harvesting to Yuan Ju. His head resting back against the seat, staring out at Oxfordshire and Wiltshire as they flew past in the light of early summer. Soft words spoken as they walked between the vines. He lifted the small, immature bunches of grapes, and told her how some of them are harvested to cut down on the yield. She listened with her head slightly to the side, straining to understand. He wasn’t sure if she understood anything that he said, but he imagined that she was enraptured by the sound and depth of his voice. The yield is lower, which allows the vines to concentrate their goodness on a small number of grapes, making those grapes – and consequently the wine – of a higher quality.

  Yuan Ju listened to every word. Pitt smiled as he told her about Hardyman’s exasperation and how it was rare for a vineyard in England to harvest the grapes in this way. Ju smiled in return, a lovely movement of her lips; eyes that smiled with the mouth. They stood and looked at each other amongst the vines, until she seemed to query him, and he continued talking about the harvest and the arguments for and against early trimming. They walked on, in the warmth of early evening, Ju attentive to every word.

  Pitt sat with his head against the chair, staring out at England as it travelled by.

  7

  Yuan Ju’s first week went well, although no one would have used the word comfortable when she was in the kitchen. It only seemed to relax when all the workers were there and the talk was loud; or when Mrs Cromwell had taken herself off, which did not always happen, as she liked to be there to pass comment on her daughter and her frankly bizarre choice of help around the home.

  Daisy twisted inside and passed her loathing and anger on to Pitt.

  Yuan Ju seemed to spend even longer in the kitchen on her first Saturday. A long morning preparing breakfast and lunch, the afternoon devoted to dinner. At just after four o’clock she appeared beside Daisy in the front garden wearing a light summer coat. Daisy had forgotten that the agency had told her Yuan Ju would need every Saturday evening away from the farmhouse.

  Yuan Ju stood with her small black shoes neatly placed together. She bowed her head, and turned and walked down the long path through the trees to the gate.

  Daisy went into the kitchen to see how Ju h
ad left the room, suddenly worried that she would have to prepare dinner for her mother and husband. Five days and already she had lost any confidence. The kitchen was immaculate; the table set for dinner; the oven light was on, a dish was cooking on low heat; the air was filled with a wonderful, exotic aroma.

  Daisy’s chest relaxed with relief; tightened with annoyance at the efficiency. The door opened from the laundry and her mother creaked into the room. The two women stared at each other across the kitchen table. An argument never seemed more than one sentence away.

  ‘She’s gone,’ said Mrs Cromwell.

  ‘She’ll be back tomorrow,’ replied Daisy. ‘She gets Saturday evenings.’

  Mrs Cromwell gave a desultory nod.

  ‘Evening starts early,’ she muttered. She looked at the clock, walked slowly to the kitchen table, an affected walk that became worse every time her daughter was in the room, and sat down, straight-backed.

  ‘Maybe,’ said Mrs Cromwell, with the forced casual air that always precluded bile, ‘you can make some proper food for dinner. God knows what you were thinking.’

  ‘She prepared something already,’ said Daisy, as ever mustering more confidence in speaking to her mother than she felt. ‘If you don’t like it, you can make a sandwich.’

  ‘God knows what you were thinking,’ repeated Mrs Cromwell. ‘I don’t know why you couldn’t just have done all the work yourself. You think I had someone to help me?’

  Daisy had only once answered that question. The ensuing argument had drained her enough to ensure that on future occasions she would let it go.

  ‘She’s only been here five days and now she’s got a night off,’ continued Mrs Cromwell. She had raised her child in a small two-bedroomed flat in Hounslow; yet now she viewed herself as the matriarchal figure, presiding over the long-standing family business.

  Having an Asian cook somehow gave her the feeling of empire; this was how it would have been in Shanghai in 1890. Should the cook get any time off at all?