A Room With No Natural Light

by Douglas Lindsay

  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.

  12

  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 s
adness 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.

  13

  Thursday. Pitt woke at 3:45 with the breaking dawn. Snapped awake, instant awareness of the morning. The sun edging its way through the curtains, grey light in the room. Daisy lying next to him, still as death. No sound from the house. No traffic close enough to hear. The window was open and he could feel the chill of morning on his face.

  Silence.

  The riddle of the birds juddered into his head, like the unwelcome arrival of a drunk relative at a funeral, and he knew that the worry would be there to stay for the day.

  It wasn’t the riddle that was the problem. It was the consequences. Birds were part of the ecosystem of the vineyard, part of the checks and balances. They fed on the insects; they didn’t cause them too many problems with the fruit. The vineyard was planted with damson hedges along the sides, so that, when the grapes appeared, so did soft fruit to lure the birds.

  Ultimately, of course, the vineyard could live without birds; but could it live with an investigation into what was happening? Could it live with the news once it got out, into the media, into the offices of all the wine buyers. They would be tainted, and, once a story had been given any sort of credence, there was little that could be done to stop it.

  He suddenly wondered what was happening at the other farms in the area. He hadn’t even thought about it up until that point. It had seemed such a peculiar occurrence, but maybe they were not alone. Maybe there were no birds all over the country, one of those freak happenings that people just hadn’t picked up on yet.

  After twelve days?

  He would tell Jenkins to drive out and around, to see what the surrounding countryside was like. Maybe Jenkins had already thought of it. As he lay in the still of morning, he chided himself for not having tried it right at the beginning.

  He did not get back to sleep. Got up and went downstairs at just after five. Yuan Ju was washing the kitchen floor, and he found himself tip-toeing absurdly to the table. Neither of them said good morning. Awkwardness hung over them, as if the previous day they had been making love, rather than standing with their backs turned to each other for a timeless five minutes.

  *

  Jenkins shook his head, even as Pitt was asking the question. They had walked outside together after breakfast. Jenkins was going off to the far side of the vineyard; the summer-long task of canopy management. Pitt hadn’t yet finished his coffee, and had followed Jenkins out so that they could speak privately. As far as he could tell, Daisy did not yet know about the birds. He was not inclined to tell her. Yet, she was in a low mood and expecting him back in the kitchen.

  ‘What?’ said Pitt, breaking off.

  ‘Checked it already,’ said Jenkins.

  ‘You didn’t ask anyone, did you?’ said Pitt, already annoyed.

  ‘No. I’ve just been onto it, looking around. You can check it. Go into town, drive through the woods on the way to Tewkesbury... everything’s as it should be. You can hear them.’ He raised his eyebrows at Pitt, looking for acknowledgement. ‘The birds,’ he added unnecessarily.

  Pitt turned away. From where he was standing he could see the cellar door. It was an addiction drawing him in. It was cool down there. You couldn’t hear birds, no matter how many of them there were in the trees and in the sky. You couldn’t hear people. Complete silence, alone with his wine. Maybe today was a day for sitting in total darkness. Sensory depravation, to the point where he and the wine would be joined in dark serenity. He coul
d feel the wine, and it would benefit from him sitting there.

  ‘What do you mean?’ he said, still staring vaguely at the cellar door. ‘Is there a line at the edge of the vineyard? As soon as you cross the line, there’s a row of birds sitting on a fence?’

  Jenkins lifted his hand, a little exasperated.

  ‘There’s no line. I haven’t precisely checked it out. There are just birds in town, there are birds in the trees away from our place. You want me to look more closely at it?’

  Pitt let out a long sigh. He turned away from the cellar and his salvation, accepting what the morning held for him.

  ‘Just...’ he, too, gestured pointlessly with his hand, ‘yes, take a look, that’s all. We might as well know what we’re dealing with.’

  Jenkins nodded and waited for any further instruction. Pitt could feel Daisy sitting inside, waiting to unload thirty years of stress from her shoulders.

  ‘Did you find a vet?’ asked Pitt, as he walked back towards the kitchen.

  ‘Blain,’ said Jenkins. ‘There’s some guy his brother knows. Had a bit of a connection, so we think we’re all right. He’s going to take a look, get back to us in a couple of days. He won’t take it anywhere.’

  Pitt barely hesitated in his reluctant walk back to the kitchen, nodded in acknowledgement. Jenkins waited another second or two, and then walked off in the other direction. He would set a couple of the lads off on the canopy work, and then he would go out to inspect the boundary for birds. Maybe take one of the other lads with him; they could laugh about it, while they listened.

  *

  Pitt sat down across from her at the table. Mrs Cromwell had gone off for the day, but even that had not lifted the gloom. Yuan Ju was no longer in the kitchen. Dispatched on other household duties. Daisy had him to herself.

  ‘What did Hardyman say last week?’ she asked.

  She was sitting with her legs crossed, clutching a cup of tea in one hand and a cigarette in the other. He hated her smoking in the kitchen and it was one of the few arguments that he’d ever won. Except when she was spoiling for a fight and she would signal her intention. The smoke would rise.