As the weekend approached, Pitt noticed that Ju became nervous, edgier; that, by the Saturday morning, the air of melancholy that hung over her was much deeper, and that she was a young woman of great sorrow.
*
Yuan Ju had left China in late February. She was twenty-three years old. It seemed that her father had been saving all Yuan Ju’s life in order to buy her way out of the country, yet, in the end, they had been unable to collect all the money that she’d needed to pay for the long journey across Asia and Europe.
Ju’s father had lived in Zhejiang province his whole life; an uninspiring life, moving with his parents from the country when the farm work in the Yangtze River delta dried up, to the city of Hangzhou. He had had such dreams of leaving, of travelling abroad to the places he’d read about in magazines.
As the West had encroached more and more on China, he had married, and had begun to make plans to emigrate to Europe with his young wife. At first, against his own father’s advice, he conducted these plans through official routes. However, it became clear to him that he was unlikely to ever be allowed to leave; or that anyone in Europe would ever be likely to accept him.
He fell into depression, his wife fell pregnant with their only child. Yuan Ju was born, with good omen, on a fresh and sunny spring morning, a sun that not even the smog of the city could obscure, in the year of the horse. Yuan Ju would be blessed. And, from the beginning, her father was determined that his daughter would have the life of Western freedom that he had been denied.
Ju was raised with stories of life in Europe, the art and the free will, the weather and the money, the newspapers and media, the mountains and the ice cream. Everything. Her father took the distilled essence of every positive thing he had ever heard about Europe, wrapped it into a single ball of beauty and hope, and presented the dream to his daughter.
She grew up with the dream, but, by the time she finally left China, to fulfil the destiny her father had always intended, she had not wanted to go.
Alone with her mother, she cried, and said that she would send for her as soon as she was in a position to. Her mother did not think that would happen, but did not say. Her grandmother had not cried, but Ju had known how horribly sad she was. The day before she left, her grandmother had given Ju a book. It was old and faded, and contained Chinese classical poetry from the time of the old dynasties.
Like her mother, Yuan Ju’s grandmother had known that she would never see Ju again.
Her father took her to the collection point, so that her mother did not have to see Ju climb into the back of a lorry. He told his wife that he was taking Ju to the airport. She knew that he was lying, just as he was aware that she knew of his deception. Yet the lie had to be told. No one talked about it, and, that evening, they returned to their small apartment on the twenty-third floor of a humble block on the outskirts of Hangzhou, and ate rice and fish, and talked no more of Ju and the journey on which she had embarked.
That night her mother cried.
*
There had been boats, buses, trucks; whatever was best to cross any particular border, a tangled route to shake off detection. The promise at the end was worth it.
Across Asia they had spent four weeks crammed in the container of a truck in the cold. By the end of that time, the stench of illness and impending death had been their companion.
Yuan Ju’s grandmother, who had been too old and straightforward to bother with the deception of her father, had given Ju instruction on how to shut down her brain. She said it would be the only way to survive being enclosed so long in such a confined space with so many people.
Ju had spent many hours sitting on the floor of her room, her legs crossed, her head bowed. Learning the art of placing your brain in hibernation; shutting off all rational and irrational thought; mind closed to others; heart rate very low; blood barely running around her body.
Wake up when you see daylight.
Yuan Ju had shut herself off. It was difficult at first; had she been brought up in the West, where everything is comparative, where there are extremes and seemingly nothing in the middle, she would have called it the hardest thing she had ever done. She did not think like that. It was just something else she had to do, and it was not easy. However, eventually, she shut herself away, curled in a corner, oblivious to the discomfort, suffering and illness of others around her.
She tried not to wonder how she would be required to work off her passage when she arrived in Great Britain, but the fear of it haunted her. She had heard stories, although her father said that they were tall tales put around by government people who did not want their citizens being smuggled out of the country to a better life.
Eventually, when they were moved from the first truck, and then smuggled across several borders in quick succession, she became aware of the conversations going on around her. None of the people seemed to know what they were coming to. For a while, Yuan Ju kept her distance, but, after a few more days, she found that she needed the company. She could only turn her brain off for so long.
There was much talk of forced labour. Some of them already knew people or had family members who had been required to go down this route. However, when she had finally joined in a conversation and voiced her opinion, the others hadn’t seemed interested. One or two of them had given her a strange look, and she’d had no idea what it had meant.
She had spent the remainder of the journey in silence, head down, staring at a dirty floor, trying to remain unaware of what was going on and being said around her.
*
The glass bowl slipped from her hands and shattered instantly on the stone floor with an explosion of sound. Daisy leapt up from her chair; Mrs Cromwell let out a loud gasp, a quickly drawn breath, turning in shock and outrage.
Ju stared down in horror and embarrassment as the pieces of the bowl shattered and travelled without much resistance over most of the flat stone tiles.
‘In the name of God!’ shouted Mrs Cromwell. ‘I could have had a heart attack.’
Daisy put her foot down to get up, her shoes immediately crunching a small piece of glass. Ju, horrified, waved her hand for Daisy to stay seated, and picked her way through the glass to get a brush. She returned shortly, a broom in her hands, and swept the floor quickly and noisily, the glass clattering. Looked at the clock frequently as she did so.
Mrs Cromwell noticed, as Daisy studied the sweep-up operation.
‘Going somewhere, is she?’ said Mrs Cromwell.
‘She gets the afternoon and evening off,’ said Daisy. ‘You know that.’
Mrs Cromwell stared bitterly at Ju, her small shoulders moving quickly in time with the brush.
‘I hope you’re going to take the cost of that bowl from her wages,’ said Mrs Cromwell. ‘Once they break something, and you don’t punish them for it, you never know where it’ll end.’
Daisy didn’t look at her. She had come, within two weeks, to desperately wish that Ju would leave, to desperately wish that she had a reason to sack her. But everyone seemed to like her cooking, which was the main reason she was there. Pitt barely seemed to notice her, which was at least reassuring; and, more than anything, she did not want to give her mother the satisfaction of getting what she wanted.
Mrs Cromwell had continued to avoid eating Ju’s food, and had eaten toast for every meal for the past twelve days.
Ju had the floor immaculately swept in a few minutes. The bowl was collected and placed in the glass-recycling bin.
‘She missed a bit,’ said Mrs Cromwell, pointing indistinctly to the floor, having waited for Ju to come back into the kitchen before saying it. Ju paid no notice. Daisy felt compelled to look, and was annoyed at herself for doing so. Couldn’t see anything.
Shortly afterwards, Ju stood in front of Daisy, bowed respectfully and left the kitchen. Mrs Cromwell watched her go in sullen silence.
Ju went to her room and had a quick shower, changed, and went back downstairs and out of the front door without going back into the kitchen. She walked down the long path to the main road, and then the further twenty-minute walk into town until she came to the first bus stop. There she waited.
*
By the time Pitt entered the kitchen again, Yuan Ju was already at the bus stop. He had hoped he would see her, but was aware that more than likely he’d be too late. She’d been nervous again at breakfast, uncomfortable. He recognised it from the previous weekend, and he had begun to wonder again where it was she might be going. Had hoped to see her before she’d gone off, but had become sidetracked out amongst the vines, talking over early signs of powdery mildew with Blain. He didn’t think it would develop into a problem, but it had to be addressed early on.
He’d walked quickly back to the farmhouse, aware that even if he had caught Ju before she left, there was nothing that he would have been able to say to her. They would have looked awkwardly at each other; she would have gone.
For that reason, perhaps, he was relieved to find her already on her way. Yet, the weight of sadness that seemed to grip Ju even more forcefully on the weekends now embraced Pitt.