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Yuan Ju was preparing fried noodles with vegetables. A more elaborate concoction of spices, as she had judged that the tastes of the men were becoming more sophisticated. Thursday afternoon. The weekend had already begun to prey on her, there was a tightness in her muscles.
Daisy had gone to collect her mother, they would be returning later. The woman from DEFRA would be filing her report. The threat of the bank lingered in the air. Pitt sat in the kitchen, watching the only person with whom he felt he had any level of empathy; and perhaps it was implicit in that empathy that they did not talk to each other.
Ju was taking her time over the vegetable preparation. The meal did not need to be served for over and hour, and she was taking comfort in Pitt’s presence.
No words had been said, and she still had not caught his eye. The sun had the warmth and brightness of a mid-summer’s afternoon; a heavy heat hung in the kitchen air, yet it was comforting rather than stifling. Where she stood at the kitchen window, Ju could smell the jasmine. With the summer heat and the smell of the flowers, if she closed her eyes, she could be in the hills where her grandmother had grown up, the village she had visited every summer of her life. Until this one long, sad summer in England.
He watched her hands and the movement of her fingers. She took a small red chilli from a pack and laid it on the wooden board. She cut the stalk off the end and then hesitated. There was total silence in the room and from outside. No planes overhead, none of the men driving a quad bike through the vineyard at that moment. There were no birds.
She swallowed and looked at the floor in his direction. She had thought about this moment many times. She would wait another few seconds. She felt nervous, but somehow even those nerves were submerged beneath the weight of her fear of the coming weekend.
She saw his feet move and then he stood and walked slowly towards her. He stopped beside her. He was looking at her, but she kept her eyes diverted, now looking back down at the chopping board.
They breathed each other in. She heard him swallow. He felt captivated and ridiculous. What would he say to Daisy, if she walked in now? How absurd would he look? The guilt would be draped on him as surely as if he was making love to Yuan Ju on the kitchen table.
And the thought was there, in his head; Ju beneath him, naked and passionate, as he thrust into her.
Without lifting the knife too high she offered it to him, her fingers trembling slightly. He wondered what he was doing, and banished the thought of her naked body from his head. He took the knife, making sure their fingers did not touch. She couldn’t breathe; her throat was dry.
He manoeuvred the chilli from her fingers, as she seemed unable to move. He sliced it lengthways, as he had seen her do many times in the previous few weeks, and then began to chop it very finely, the movement of the knife so slow that it made no sound on the wood. Her fingers were still resting on the board beside him, no more than a couple inches from the knife.
He was standing next to the cook, chopping a chilli, aware that his mouth was dry and his heart was pounding. She let her eyes drift over his hands and up the length of his arms, but they never reached his face. She could not look at him.
Would he be standing so close if he knew what she would be doing that weekend?
Pitt suddenly thought again of the shame if Daisy should return at that moment. Or if Jenkins or one of the other men came in. He hesitated and slowly laid the knife down on the board even though he hadn’t finished. He couldn’t look at her, didn’t want to leave her side. He wanted to stand this close, he wanted their hands to touch, he wanted to hold her. More than anything, he wanted to talk to her. He wanted to ask her where she had come from, and why she was here, and where she went on Saturday afternoons, and what was it about those days that made her so sad.
A thought came into his head. A thought from nowhere. A strange thought that made no sense whatsoever. He glanced at her, and, since he did not have Ju’s inhibition, he was able to look at her face from so close beside her. Her head was bowed, her eyes on his fingers, although her look shifted when she realised that he was staring at her.
How could it be? The thought that had just occurred to him, how could it be? He did not know where the thought had come from. He had never had a thought like that in his life. He had never before had a thought that transcended rationality.
He lowered his eyes at last, aware that he might have been making her feel uncomfortable. In fact, Ju flowered beneath his gaze. Their fingers still sat side by side on the chopping board, and had drifted to no more than a fraction of an inch apart. He wanted to touch her, to make that infinitesimal movement to his right. It was all it would take to feel the electricity of the touch.
His head dropped an inch. Their fingers remained so close, but he was not going to be able to bridge that divide. Now that he realised the truth, however, he did not just want to touch her finger. He wanted to hold her, he wanted to take the great weight of melancholy that hung so heavily around her and throw it away, banish it from her forever.
He frowned. He didn’t really understand, and his inability to show her his compassion depressed him further. Slowly his fingers curled up, moving away from Ju, as he removed his hand, then he turned away without looking at her. A few steps across the kitchen, while Ju stared at the chopping board, he lifted his hat from the far side of the kitchen and walked slowly back outside.
Finally, when he was gone, she was able to breathe properly, but she felt the awful weight of his leaving, and she wondered if she had in some way overstepped the mark.
She heard his footsteps on the stones outside and watched him walk away towards the vines, his hat on his head, his shoulders slightly stooped.