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For the second night in a row, Pitt did not sleep at all, although, on this evening, he did at least spend several hours lying in bed, Daisy next to him, wrapped in her familiar silence.
Pitt arrived home from Bristol at some time after ten in the evening. He had taken spare clothes, in case he had to change out of blood-stained, incriminating evidence. In the end there hadn’t been much blood, and he’d only had to change his shirt. The soiled one he would dispose of later. Others might also have had cause to want to so easily dispose of the images in their head. For Pitt, it did not matter.
When he returned, Daisy and Mrs Cromwell were watching television. He walked along the corridor behind them and went straight upstairs, had a shower and got into bed. When Daisy came up, he lay with his eyes closed and did not speak to her. It would have been too much to say that he pretended to be asleep, as Daisy was well aware that he was awake, as much as he was aware that she understood that he didn’t want to talk to her.
At some point she fell asleep, and he lay on his back, watching the dark of night gradually lighten, wondering what he was going to do with Ju, and how quickly he would be required to do it.
He got out of bed at 4:30 and went downstairs. Ju was not yet there. He made a cup of coffee, then sat at the table, staring straight ahead, unseeing, at the wall. Thinking about the cook. She could not stay here, with Mrs Cromwell vigilant and determined.
The door opened behind him. Pitt had not moved for over ten minutes, the coffee cooling before him. He glanced up at the clock and turned in the same movement.
Ju paused in the doorway. For once she looked Pitt in the eye. She had no idea what was returned in his look; face impassive, eyes as cold as they always were.
Her gaze dropped. She did not dare hope that Pitt was feeling the same things as she had been. A day and night of no sleep with an overactive mind had not allowed her to understand why he could still be interested in her. Now that he knew her secret. Yet, he had come for her and brought her back to his home.
Pitt glanced again at the clock. It was still very early for a Monday morning, but one could never tell when Daisy or Mrs Cromwell would first appear, wraithlike in the kitchen, dragging a cold wind in their wake. He did not have long.
Ju looked up as he moved towards her, caught another glimpse into his eyes, thought perhaps that she saw a light that was not normally there. He stopped in front of her, surprising her. Ju stared at his feet.
Pitt waited for her to look up, to look into those eyes from twelve inches away; to stand this close, to smell her and feel her, to engage her finally after all these weeks. To tell her that she had to leave. To tell her that she no longer had to worry about Chen Yun.
No words came. Pitt felt strangled. It was barely five in the morning, but the farmhouse woke early in the summer. He felt the ticking, an encroachment at his back, forcing him forward.
He walked to the door that led through to the house, gripped by an unusual sense of purpose. Once more, he had the feeling that, if interrupted by Daisy, the guilt would be draped on him like a cobweb.
He stood at the door, holding it open, waiting for Ju to look up. She turned, concerned, wondering what was happening. Pitt, so full of compassion and love for her, looked stern and unforgiving. Nothing of what he felt showed through, and Ju wondered if at last he had come to his senses. At last he had realised the kind of person he had in his midst.
The door was open, the implication at last obvious. She was to follow him. Head still bowed, she moved towards the door, then Pitt moved as she fell in behind him.
They walked along the short corridor that led behind the sitting rooms and dining room. A light carpet when Pitt would have preferred the old creaking wood. Grateful, for once, for something that Daisy had done around the house. He came to the door to Ju’s bedroom and stopped. He glanced at her as she came up behind him, embarrassed by his own clumsiness.
He opened the door to her bedroom and stood back. A guard, while she collected her few things. Ju did not immediately understand, and stood on the other side of the door from Pitt wondering what was happening. Finally it occurred to her. She had heard of men in China who had been found guilty of some disciplinary measure at their place of work. They would not be given notice, they would not be asked to leave at the end of the day; they would be marched to their work station, ordered to collect their things, and then escorted from the premises. Often, much worse followed.
Ju was being asked to leave, and she felt the immediate shame of it.
She walked quickly into the room. She did not have many things to collect. She must not cry.
She packed quickly, yet still neatly, her clothes folded into a bag, her few personal items placed on top. The book her grandmother had given her. The photograph of her mother and father. The simple bracelet that she’d had since she was a child.
They had not been allowed to carry much on the journey. Anything of value would have been taken from them.
She was packed and ready to leave the farmhouse in less than a minute. She lifted her coat, and then stood at the entrance to her room, a couple of feet from Pitt, her head bowed. He did not speak, and Ju, not really knowing what to do, walked past him and through to the kitchen.
Pitt glanced into her room, made sure that she had taken everything. A cursory check, having not previously looked in the room since Ju had arrived, then he followed her through to the kitchen. Glanced quickly up at the clock again, then to the back door and straight outside. He held it open for her, and Ju followed him, her head still bowed in shame. She thought that she would not look at him again.
The morning was beautiful, still and fresh. Pitt hesitated, looking up at the trees. He always took a moment when he first stepped outside in the morning. To taste the day. The morning was always the best time, regardless of whether it was warm or cold or wet or fogbound. The smell of the new.
Ju stood still beside him, wondering what his intentions were for her, imagining nothing other than complete and instant dismissal. As he stood looking up at the trees, wondering how long it would be before they would be in a position to expect the return of the birds, Ju walked slowly past him, heading for the drive.
She had nowhere to go. She would walk down to the end of the drive, and face the decision she had faced the previous Saturday. Turn left and she could head out into the world. What then? And what would Chen Yun do to her family if she ran away? That was the fear that would make her turn right at the bottom of the lane. Walk to the village. Wait until the next bus arrived, then travel to Bristol.
Her thoughts stalled at that. What would she do once she had arrived at the bus station? She could not even go to the house, the place which she dreaded more than anywhere in the world. Its location had always been kept from her. She would have nothing else to do but walk the streets of the Bristol suburbs until she found it. And if she could not, then the following Saturday she would make her way back to the bus station to wait to be collected.
It is all I deserve for having failed my family, thought Ju.
She turned at the sound of Pitt’s footsteps on the gravel. He was not walking after her, but around the side of the house. She stopped to watch him for a second.
He came to the door at the side that led down to the cellar. Ju had noticed the door, and had once seen Pitt emerge from there in the afternoon; she had thought about it, thought about the layout of the house, and presumed it to be the cellar.
Pitt opened the cellar door and turned back to Ju. They looked at each other, now thirty yards apart, on a chill early morning in late summer. With no birdlife and no breeze, and with the buildings and the trees around them, there was the dull silence of heavy fog or thick snow.
He wanted her to go with him, into a dark room underneath the house. After what she’d had to endure through her horrible summer of weekends, the claustrophobic nightmare of a room with no natural light, the thought could have chilled her or numbed her or made her limbs immobile, or sent her down the driveway, running to whatever freedom she could find.
Yet it did not. Not with Pitt a few yards away, solid and honest, a certainty to cling to. She did not even remotely understand him, but she knew she could trust him.
She turned her back on the driveway, turned her back on the uncertainty that it held, and followed Pitt to the cellar door.
They walked down a narrow flight of steps, illuminated by a small bare light bulb. Usually, Pitt did not even turn on the light. At the bottom, he opened another door and walked into the cellar. There was an array of light switches on the wall to the right. The cellar had been wired up so that it could be very bright, but Pitt only ever turned them on if a distributor or wine merchant had come to call.
He turned on one light, a dim overhead bulb at the back of the large and open cellar, then walked towards it. Ju hesitated as she entered the room, and then began to follow Pitt. She looked at the wine barrels large, stacked in rows, with no comprehension. She had never seen anything like it before, and so it was not within her understanding, and she did not try. She was nervous but had no sense of fear.
At the far end of the cellar, away from the light, behind the final row of barrels, there was a small hard wooden seat. Pitt collected it and brought it over to the other side of the cellar, close to where the bulb was illuminating a small corner.
The floor was immaculately clean, the walls sheer brick, neither dusty nor cobwebbed. The barrels looked polished. The light above her head was shaded and of low wattage. To the left there was another door. There was nothing against the walls. Between the last row of barrels and the wall there was a gap of around eight or nine feet.
Ju was being brought to the small area to hide. She did not understand, she could not ask, but she had such innate trust in Pitt that she would automatically accept what was being done.
Pitt walked to the wooden door to the left, opened it and turned on the light. It was a small room, just big enough for the toilet and wash hand basin. Everything was white and immaculately clean, emphasising the brightness of the light. Having shown Ju the room, Pitt immediately turned off the light and closed the door.
Now he faced her, in the dim light of his cellar. His decision to bring her down here had been taken in the middle of the night. He had no idea how long she would need to stay, or of the logistics of it. She had water and a toilet. The cellar was cool but not cold. He would need to bring her food, and bedding of some sort.
He would lock the door so that no one else inadvertently came down here, but it meant, in effect, that he would be making her his prisoner. It had the most awful connotations, a young woman, already being forced to work in the sex trade, being kept locked in a cellar. Society, the great animal that he so abhorred, would not view him kindly, or with any sympathy or credulity.
It was this thought that had kept him awake through the night. He had made Ju’s bed, but he could not let her lie in it for too long.
He nodded and walked quickly past her. Did not want her thinking that he was about to take advantage of her. It was his intention to free her from the life she had come to, but he had no idea what she was thinking. She could have feared that having discovered her dark Saturday evening secret, he was now going to lock her away and keep her for the same purpose. That this was what Ju might come to think troubled him far more than the idea of society in general heaping opprobrium upon him.
He walked out quickly, leaving her alone. He did not turn back at the door. Closed it, walked up the stairs, closed the door at the top and locked it, slipped the key into his pocket. Round the side of the house and into the kitchen. Glanced at the clock, still well before six. The morning remained fresh, the day yet to happen. He stood still in the middle of the kitchen listening to the sound of the house. There was nothing. No floorboards, no sound of running water or creaking pipes. Usually when someone was abroad, there would be some rumour of their actions. In an old house, it was hard to conceal movement.
He still had some time before he was joined by the bitter collective.
He had watched Ju, knew the kinds of things she might eat. Simple food. Fruit, uncooked vegetables, rice, some plain bread. He quickly gathered a few things together, nothing elaborate. Lifted a small cotton bag from a drawer, placed them inside. Bag packed, he stopped again and listened. Still nothing.
She would need bedding, and perhaps there would be no better time to take it than this early, with no one else around, but he did not want to take too many chances. He moved quietly to the back door, and once more went through the furtive and silent routine of going back down to the cellar, wondering if she would fear the sound of the door every time.
She was sitting on the small wooden seat. The light still on, she was holding the handles of her bag, while the bag sat on the floor. She looked small and vulnerable and beautiful. He tried not to look at her.
He approached her with a strange uncertainty and placed the bag at her feet. She looked at the ground. He hesitated another second, and then turned and walked from the cellar.