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Yuan Ju was cooking a Thai dish, something she’d picked up in her few weeks in the UK prior to coming to work for Pitt. Fresh root ginger. Lemon grass. Kaffir lime leaves. Garlic chives. Fresh coriander. Prawns. Squid. Coconut milk.
He watched her from his place at the kitchen table, as he had done the day before and each day the previous week. They had fallen into a ritual that was at once comforting and exciting.
He wondered if Yuan Ju found it awkward that he sat there; watching the movement of her fingers; watching her glide slowly around the kitchen; watching her clothes stretch across her breasts as she reached up to the high shelves; watching the slow dancing movements of her feet.
Sometimes he felt a dryness at the back of his throat, but that was easily solved by drinking water. He didn’t think it was sexual, the urge that drove him to remain at the breakfast table long after he was due out in the fields. It wasn’t sexual, but he didn’t like to examine it in case it might have been.
It was the warmth of the moment, which had nothing to do with the sun and the stove; the warmth of watching someone quietly do their work. Slow movements in near silence. He couldn’t express it; he possibly didn’t even know how to think about it. The calm spread through his body. That was all.
The precise movements of her hands, the gentle chop of the knife on the board, the grating of strange roots. Occasionally he would catch the aroma of fresh ginger or cinnamon, or the scent of some vegetable that he did not know.
Some days he longed to talk to her, to stand beside her and ask her to talk him through what she was doing. The ease of that conversation meant that it was not for wont of an opening line that he did not speak. Yet he could not bring himself to engage her. He didn’t know what scared him. Other days he quickly accepted his reticence, did not torture himself and would sink into the elegy of the moment.
Silence can seem so wise, more often than it can appear a lack of anything to say. Pitt’s own silence, the silence into which he had now drifted, was made with no conviction, having arisen organically from the man he had become. Perhaps it was not wise, but if it meant that Pitt spoke less stupidly than most others, it was a credit in itself.
Did he take Ju’s silence as sagacity? Or was it respect for her employers, or a mundane lack of ability to communicate in English? Whatever it was, he realised that it was part of the strange chemistry that drew him towards her.
He did not have to find the words; he would never have to find the words, and she would never expect him to.
He could not remember a time when he had been able to speak to Daisy without her judging him, dissecting every word and phrase, pulling him apart. It had not driven him to silence – that had been a gradual and ever-increasing inevitability of his personality – but his near silence had been to his great advantage in conducting relations with his wife.
He wondered sometimes if Daisy was offended by Ju’s silence.
For all that he looked forward to mornings in the kitchen with Ju, they never ended well. Eventually, his work would drag him away, or Ju would finish what she was doing in the kitchen and self-consciously leave to take up some other task.
Pitt would feel like the clothes had been taken off his back.
*
‘Listen.’
They were standing in the shade at the back of the farmhouse, Pitt squinting towards the light.
He had spent the previous few hours in the cellars, turning the bottles of cuvée, sitting beside the oak barrels of the pinot. He knew of some winemakers who thought there was little point in leaving the wine in the barrels for more than a couple of months. Pitt liked to leave them for a full year. Give or take.
Then again, some winemakers probably thought there was little point in talking to the wine.
He hadn’t talked this morning. He talked less and less as the vintage matured. He hadn’t come to thinking that it wasn’t important; he had come to thinking that the wine had aged enough that it did not need so much nurturing. He talked more at the start of the process. Even so, some days his words dried up and he had nothing to say. He transferred his taciturnity of the kitchen to the wine cellar and would sit in comfortably morose silence.
It was a warm day, much cooler out of the sun. He could hear the buzz of a couple of insects. He lifted his head and looked at the sky. Away to their left there was a plane leaving its contrail against the pale blue, but it travelled soundlessly to them.
Pitt looked back down at the dead starling that was lying at their feet.
‘I know,’ said Pitt.
‘No birds,’ said Jenkins, who did not share Pitt’s ability for leaving words unsaid. ‘One of the lads pointed it out yesterday afternoon. I hadn’t thought about it, but once he said it, you know... I can’t remember the last time I saw a bird around here. A live one, at any rate.’
Pitt stepped away from him and looked into the trees that made up the small wood at the back of the farmhouse.
‘Not so long,’ said Pitt. ‘I noticed it just over a week ago. But even then, there were still only one or two.’
He stared at the starling. It would be the same as the others. Unmarked, seemingly all right. Yet dead.
‘How many have you found?’ he asked. He looked at Jenkins, thinking that he ought to have asked him this before.
‘I wasn’t counting at first. Maybe five or six.’
‘You only brought me one,’ said Pitt.
‘The guys found them,’ answered Jenkins. ‘I’ve been meaning to talk to you about it. You were away yesterday.’
Pitt nodded in a fraction of acknowledgement.
‘If there are no birds coming here, where are the dead ones coming from?’
Jenkins shrugged. ‘A lot of the ones we’re finding have been dead for a while. Maybe birds have stopped coming here, just the odd one or two that don’t realise. Maybe they just stumbled into the area, not as attuned to whatever it is that’s killing them.’ He paused. Pitt didn’t look convinced, but it sounded plausible. ‘Then they die,’ Jenkins added, unnecessarily.
‘What don’t they realise?’ said Pitt, although the question was directed at the ground and not Jenkins. He didn’t expect Jenkins to have an answer.
‘You didn’t spray anything on the vines?’ said Jenkins tentatively.
Pitt answered him with a look. Jenkins retracted the question with a vague movement of his eyes.
‘Shall I ask you the same thing?’ said Pitt. ‘Or any of the men? You have a tight enough rein on them?’
‘They all just do as they’re told,’ he answered.
‘Right,’ said Pitt, not even waiting for him to finish the sentence. He straightened his shoulders, took a step away. Looked back at the sky. He was tempted to go back down to the cellar, but he always suffered when he spent too long down there. He needed to walk through the vines, feel the warmth on his face.
Coffee first. Then the vines. Brace the cold wind that often met him in the kitchen. Then he thought of the warmth of Yuan Ju. Maybe she would be there.
‘You know any vets?’ asked Pitt before he left. He didn’t like animals, had never kept a pet. ‘You know, are there vet pathologists, something like that?’
‘Don’t know.’
‘Find out,’ said Pitt. ‘Find someone, take them a bird.’ He looked down at the starling with distaste, as if the starling was entirely to blame. ‘Find someone, someone who’ll keep it quiet for the time being. We don’t want public health people all over the place for nothing.’
Jenkins nodded and bent down to pick up the bird. Felt a twinge in his back as he did so.
‘If it’s serious,’ said Pitt, ‘and we have to do something, we’ll do it. I just don’t want some Ministry jobsworth coming down here and poking his nose in if it’s not needed.’
Jenkins nodded again. He rubbed his back, looked at the bird, and then stared up into the sky, hoping that a sudden flock of starlings would negate the conversation they’d just had. Another plane had come into view, its trail crossing that of the other plane, which was now out of sight.
Pitt stared at the ground. It was such a bizarre problem to have that it made him angry. The daily problems of the vineyard, of not enough sun and too much water, of birds and insects eating the grapes, and fungal infections and mosses and acidity in the soil, that was what he understood.
Dead birds, a problem that he just did not understand, seemed far worse.