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Four days after the first Saturday evening, Yuan Ju seemed less weighed down by her burden of sorrow; yet all things are relative to something, and, relative to happiness, Ju still carried her melancholy like a dead weight. The weight lifted slightly when she was alone in the kitchen, or when she was there with Pitt. However, the presence of the lady of the house, and the succubus of her mother, made Ju feel desperately uncomfortable.
‘She’ll have to go, you know,’ said Mrs Cromwell.
She was sitting in a chair by the fireplace, reading the Daily Mail. Daisy was at the table, sewing a skirt that didn’t need sewn. Since the arrival of Yuan Ju, Daisy found that she had time to do things that didn’t require doing. Yuan Ju was at the sink, washing vegetables.
‘Mother,’ said Daisy in a strained whisper. ‘She can hear you.’
‘You think she speaks English?’ said Mrs Cromwell, raising her voice slightly. ‘She’s showing no signs of it.’
She rustled the newspaper over to the next page, happily believing everything she read.
‘She’ll have to go,’ she repeated.
‘You would say that,’ said Daisy.
‘Well, yes I would,’ remarked Mrs Cromwell, ‘because I’m the only one around here with any common sense.’
‘The men all love her food.’
‘Men,’ muttered Mrs Cromwell darkly. ‘Does she even have a passport?’
Mrs Cromwell looked up from the paper; Daisy kept her eyes on the summer skirt. A bitter smile eased its way onto Mrs Cromwell’s face.
‘You haven’t checked that, have you? You could be employing an illegal immigrant. Or an asylum seeker.’
Her words delivered with all the moral outrage that those names invoked in her kind.
‘God, mother, she could be British for all we know. She might not have a passport because she doesn’t need one.’
‘How can she not need one?’ said Mrs Cromwell indignantly. ‘She’s a foreigner.’
‘She could have been born here,’ snapped Daisy, having lost all pretence at a whisper and at having a discussion about Ju that she could not hear.
‘You sound like a liberal,’ snapped Mrs Cromwell. ‘I don’t understand.’
She turned another page, moving away from celebrity gossip. Mrs Cromwell did not want to know about celebrities. She wanted to know how awful it was to be living in Britain, she wanted to feel justified in her general ill-humour, and in her fear and mistrust of society.
‘So, why don’t you ask her?’ said Mrs Cromwell crisply, her lips pursed.
‘What?’ said Daisy.
‘Ask her. Go on.’
Mrs Cromwell looked at Ju to see if she was paying any attention. Ju’s head was down, cold tap water spilling over her hands. Daisy followed Mrs Cromwell’s gaze and looked round at the new cook.
‘Scared you’ll find out that you’re breaking the law?’ asked Mrs Cromwell, with a happy sneer. ‘Go on then, see where it gets you.’
Daisy had been goaded into it. Her mother won every battle. As a young girl, with her father gone, she had raised her mother far above the station she deserved. She had forgiven her the bitterness and the mean spirited way in which she had raised her daughter. It had seemed natural under the circumstances, and she had allowed herself to forget that her mother had been like that prior to her father’s death.
Mrs Cromwell had become used to having her way and winning. Daisy had become used to subservience and defeat. The realisation that her mother was rotten-hearted had come too late to save her.
Daisy stood and turned towards Yuan Ju. She felt humiliated by her mother, humiliated that she was doing this. Goaded into getting help, goaded into driving that help away. In eleven days she had come to enjoy having someone else around doing the hard work, even if enjoyment did not naturally show itself.
‘Yuan Ju,’ she said quietly, though her voice sounded harsh and resentful.
Yuan Ju turned slowly, her hands still in the sink, her torso turned as she looked over her shoulder. Her long black hair was tied back, strands hanging down over her expressionless face. Mrs Cromwell could only look at her for a moment before turning back to the paper.
‘She’s got to go,’ she muttered.
‘Yuan Ju?’ said Daisy again.
‘Get on with it,’ murmured the acid tongue from beside the fireplace.
Yuan Ju finally detached her hands from the sink, shaking the water from them and turning to fully face Daisy. The tap water drummed gently into the metal basin. Her lips were slightly parted. Water dripped from her fingers onto the cold stone floor.
Daisy picked up on some sense of the sadness that hung over her, but it did not induce sympathy. It scared her; antagonised her. Ju was an opposite force to the unpleasant resistance of her mother, but it was a force with which she had just as much difficulty.
Ju’s eyes drew her in, great wells of longing and hopelessness. Maybe Daisy found it was like looking in a mirror; yet, her own desperation came out in bitterness and anger and regret and spitefulness, not this attractive melancholy.
‘Yuan Ju,’ she said again, her voice hardening. Mrs Cromwell glanced over but did not comment this time, aware that her daughter was finally getting around to her duty.
The door opened. Pitt walked into the cold. If he sensed the atmosphere, he completely ignored it. Glanced at Daisy with something of a nod; did not look at Mrs Cromwell. He was pleased that Ju was there, a pleasure diminished by the fact that they would not be alone.
He did not look at her.
Lifted the kettle, placed it under the already running tap, making sure to avoid any contact with Ju’s back, then back on the stove. Turned on the gas ring, turned the tap off. Pitt looked in the coffee jar, found it empty. Lifted the coffee beans from the cupboard, plugged in the grinder.
Daisy watched him in resentful silence. At last, Ju turned back to the sink and turned the tap on to a gentle stream. Mrs Cromwell surveyed them for a moment, then folded the paper, placed it on the pile of old newspapers beside the chair and lifted herself, with exaggerated caution, to her feet.
As Mrs Cromwell left, to stalk the corridors of the house before venturing out for the remainder of the day, Daisy turned back to her case of insignificant and unnecessary sewing. The coffee grinder started to churn; the familiar ugly grating that jarred her insides. She closed her eyes, tried to think where her mother might be so that she could go somewhere else, then placed the sewing on the table and left the room.
They had swept out quietly, ghosts in the undergrowth. When the coffee grinder stopped and Pitt looked round, he found them gone.
He was alone with Yuan Ju.
The water splashed into the sink as she peeled and washed the carrots. Pitt stopped and listened to the sound. They had their backs to each other, no more than a few feet apart. He wondered if that feeling really existed; that tangible sense of someone being at his back, of a magnet drawing him in. Did he only feel it because he was obsessing, because he knew she was there? Would he have felt it anyway, even if he had never seen her before, and he had been standing somewhere with Ju a few feet away? Were they drawn together? Chemically drawn? Did that happen?
Not in Pitt’s world. A dark world; a world in a cellar talking to wine; a world where, even in the summer’s light of the vineyard, walking between the vines, the darkness sat in his head, a physical presence.
Yet, he could feel Ju now, as if she was wrapped around him. He closed his eyes and drowned slowly in the feeling. The soft touch of her hair, her skin against his, her fingers running up and down his arms, across his chest. The smell of her, the warmth of her breath on his cheek.
The water splashed into the sink. He opened his eyes, taking a quick breath. The kettle had started to boil. He had been dragged back from somewhere far away that he did not recognise. He looked round, away from Ju, wondering if Daisy was in the room, watching him, her loathing on the verge of eruption. No one there. He glanced quickly at Ju, then looked away. She stood in the same position, her back turned, head bowed to her work. Washing and peeling.
They had been standing there for five minutes while the kettle boiled slowly on the stove. She had been washing the same carrot the entire time, her eyes closed, her fingers mechanical.
Pitt poured the water into the cafetière, lifted a mug from the rack and walked quickly over to the kitchen table. Sat down. The door opened and Daisy came in wearing a summer jacket.
Pitt had his back to Ju, just pressing the top of the cafetière. Daisy stared at him, not at all judgemental at the silence, not picking up on the fact that there might have been more to it than a silence could show. A person who rarely spoke was in a room with someone who never spoke.
‘I’m going out,’ she said bluntly.
Pitt nodded. Never asked. Never knew where she went. Could have been going anywhere, seeing anyone. Sex, shopping, a lonesome walk across the fields. He never knew, and thought so little about it that it would even have been too much to say that he didn’t care.
She waited for him to speak, then tutted loudly when he didn’t, and closed the door.
Pitt lifted the coffee to his lips. Yuan Ju moved onto another carrot.