Songs from the Violet Cafe Read online

  ‘Bit haughty,’ he said to his girlfriend, loudly enough for everyone to hear.

  ‘Violet,’ Hugo said. Or he thought he did, but perhaps he hadn’t made a sound. Violet who had changed his life, who had brought him another son, and, later, riches. It was hard to believe, looking back, that he and Ming had ended up wealthy, not that they let it show. All that produce, all the fruit and vegetables, the harvests they reaped. They were richer than Louis Messenger’s father, an unhappy man who made bad choices in love. He wished, for Ming’s sake, that Tao had gone away to university, but some things were not meant to happen.

  ‘You were right not to stay with me,’ said this voice that didn’t seem to be speaking out loud, this floating apparition of words in his head. He could hear the words, felt them formulating in his mouth, it was just that somehow his jaw had gone rigid. It was a pity children had to grow up. So many children he’d known. Violet was the first of them. She’d grown up and gone away.

  She stopped by his table. ‘All right, Hugo?’

  ‘But you came back,’ he said and was pleased to have uttered this thought.

  ‘Soon,’ she said, ‘I’ve got a few more things to do, and I’ll be back.’

  All those boys, she had said to him. He wished they were all here, but the restaurant wasn’t their style. He’d like to make a speech for his birthday and tell them how happy they’d made him. How he wished all happiness for them. How they should honour the memory of their mother who had gone through great trials and hardship to give them a good life. But they knew that anyway, even the odd one for whom the brothers had found a wife, and who had children of his own. Perhaps it was as well that he couldn’t get the words out to say anything now, to this assembled group of people. He would like to tell Lou that he was a good boy before the war, and where to look for his boat, the one thing he’d built with his own hands before he went away to war, and come back and got married in a rush, and became a puller of sharp tricks ever since, a poor man parading as rich. He wanted to tell John that his search wasn’t over, that he had farther to go in the world than this. Even though this, this café, was a place that he loved, where some of his money had settled. Perhaps they knew this, perhaps they understood. Better not to go on about it now. Once he started, he had the feeling that the words would come out in a steady gush, like vomiting, something indescribably embarrassing for everyone there. Jessie, the new girl, hesitated by his table. She was a big uncertain person, a little untidy in her movements, yet resolute in the way she had tackled the evening’s work.

  ‘Tell her to come now,’ he said to Jessie. ‘Violet. Now is the time to come back.’ At least, he thought he said that, but he couldn’t be sure, because the girl’s face didn’t register anything, except a look of passing concern.

  ‘How about some music?’ called Lou in a loud voice from across the room. ‘Where’s the piano player?’

  ‘We shot him,’ said Marianne.

  ‘Marianne, that’s enough,’ said Violet. ‘Our last musician proved unsuitable.’

  ‘You mean he hit the piss,’ said Lou.

  ‘Stop it, Dad,’ said Evelyn, entering this conversation uninvited.

  ‘What about John? John could give us a tune.’ Lou looked like a delighted boy in his sudden quest for music.

  ‘He can’t play and cook at the same time,’ Violet snapped. ‘No more to drink, Lou, that’s my last word.’

  ‘Me, drink? Oh ma’am, you don’t serve drinks here, do you?’

  ‘I’m telling you, I’ll send you home.’

  ‘You’d throw me out, Violet?’ In spite of his quick fury, he had quietened down. He glanced sideways at his daughter, who had moved on, her eyes straight ahead, her mouth set.

  ‘I would if I had to,’ Violet said. ‘I should have done it when Freda was here.’

  ‘No you wouldn’t.’ His smile had grown impudent again.

  ‘I’ll play a tune for you if you want,’ said the skinny youth who had stayed behind. He had already seated himself at the piano.

  He played ‘Happy Birthday’ and Marianne started the singing off. They sang Happy birthday to you/happy birthday to you/ happy bi-irthdaaay dear Hu-go/happy birthday to you, Marianne using a high girlish lisp because she’d heard about the way Marilyn Monroe had sung this to President Kennedy, and everyone in the café laughed and gave her a round of applause and joined in, except Jessie who thought bloody birthdays, there’s too much made of them, and that she’d had more than enough birthdays to last her a lifetime. Not that she wanted to be dead, she just wanted to be happy.

  ‘His name’s David,’ said Evelyn, who had learnt this from her mother, as she was leaving.

  David Finke kept on playing. He started into a new tune, singing a few words of the melody, a melancholy thread of a song about violets that went on growing, even when it was snowing.

  Violet looked up, with a startled expression. ‘Where did you learn that?’

  David answered her without pausing as he pursued the melody. ‘My mother used to play it.’

  Violet tapped her finger in time to the music, as Lou led a round of clapping, and even Felix Adam nodded his head approvingly.

  ‘You’re the boy from the radio station, aren’t you,’ Violet said. ‘Do you want an evening job?’

  ‘We could do with a piano player,’ John said.

  ‘Sure,’ said David, ‘yeah, I’d like that.’

  Evelyn looked pleased, as if her mother had redeemed herself for the moment.

  At some point, near the end of the meal, when the staff had gone back to the kitchen, and the diners were pushing back their chairs and looking for scarves and handbags, and Felix and his wife had already sauntered out into the night, Hugo seemed to sigh, and folded his hands in front of him. His head slipped slowly forward onto the table, his thin wisps of hair floating on the plate.

  ‘I think he’s dead,’ Jessie told Violet Trench shortly afterwards, for Jessie had learnt first aid as well as French at Wellington Girls’, and she could see that it was impossible to revive him, even though, with the café cleared of its customers, she worked on him, breathing in and out of his old tobacco-stained saucy mouth until there was nothing more to be done and the ambulance came and took him away.

  ‘My father. My father,’ said John in a scarcely audible voice.

  This was how Jessie spent her first evening away from home, listening to uncomprehending sounds of grief, helping to close down the restaurant under Violet Trench’s stony instructions, and rinsing her mouth out with cold water at the basin. At roughly the same time her mother at last found the note she had left on her pillow back home in Island Bay in Wellington, and commenced her descent into illness.

  Just before the ambulance driver drew a grey blanket over Hugo’s face, Violet placed two fingers on his cooling face. She said, ‘I hope he’s hearing all the music in the world.’

  You wouldn’t believe how blue the lakes are here. Mum, I’m sorry I’m not coming home at the moment, but the woman I work for is very strict about time off. Don’t worry about my legal studies mark — you knew I wouldn’t get a pass because I wasn’t there to sit the exam.

  Love, Jessie

  ‘You can’t leave now,’ Violet Trench said the day after Hugo died.

  At first, Jessie didn’t see why not. It was not as if she was going to the funeral and there was nothing more the police or the doctors wanted to know. Just a huge aneurism and the old man was dead and it was nothing at all to do with her. And yet something made her feel she couldn’t leave, that somehow she was connected to the Violet Café. When Violet Trench asked her to stay on she said yes. There was a spare bed at the place where Marianne stayed.

  Dearest Jessie,

  I am glad you are well and safe. I must say it was a shock when you left but I know what a strain you’ve been under with your study. Nothing matters to me except that you are all right and there will be another year and you can change your courses. I can see now that you’ve got too much imaginat
ion for the law. Perhaps you’ll be a writer like my friend I went to school with, the one who went abroad. It feels as if you’re overseas now. We can talk about it all at Christmas time, which isn’t far off.

  Your loving Mother

  VIOLET

  Violet shopped early in the mornings for her supplies. First she bought the meat. She had been going to the same butcher ever since she opened the Violet Café. His name was Shorty Toft, or that’s the name she knew him by, though there was a rumour that his real name was Nigel, and his window sign read N. Toft so perhaps it was true. He didn’t look like a Nigel. The shop was painted red. It had been a scandal in town when he first put his bright colour on it, but then someone painted one of the hotels pink, and nobody noticed any more. Violet thought it showed a touch of innovation. She liked the cut of his meat, the way he trimmed back the fat, and how he could focus on the sweetest nut of a fillet, and the absolutely straight cut of a pork chop, so that that most difficult of meats could be cooked evenly. Shorty was not the dwarf the name implied. As he explained to Violet, he had been the youngest of three sons, and of course he was always the shortest of the family until all the brothers were fully grown, so that’s what he was labelled by his dad, and he expected he’d take the name to his grave. She called him Shorty, he called her Mrs Trench to her face, and Madam behind her back, like most of the other shopkeepers in town. All the same, they had a line of banter touching on the ribald now and then.

  ‘I’ll give you a bit of meat all right,’ he said, regular as the town clock on the mock-Tudor post office, with just a little emphasis on the word meat, but not enough to cause offence. She was one of his best customers.

  ‘No tripe,’ she said, when she was in a particularly good mood.

  ‘I’m not a man to mince matters,’ Shorty would say, when she asked him about his chilblains which were cruel in the winters, his greasy fingers like pink cheerio sausages. The town had always been known for the heaviness of its frosts, and days of black ice, hard on people who must work in the cold. ‘They’re killing me.’ But then he would laugh, a rough cheerful bark intended to tell her that life was never as bad as people made out. He was a widower, and that had been a pretty cruel cut, he told her one morning, rubbing the back of his arm across his face. Then he had straightened his back, and acted as if he’d just had an itch on his hairline.

  Once a week, when Violet had finished at Shorty’s shop, she drove her blue Volkswagen out into the country to the market gardens, where she was known. She and her cook, John Wing Lee who lived near the gardens with his family, worked out with his brother Chun, who was also known as Harry and the other gardeners the quantities of fruit and vegetables in season that she would need. This was the special pleasure of her work, knowing that everything served in her restaurant was made from the very best and freshest products available.

  ‘You drive carefully now, Mrs Trench,’ Shorty said every Wednesday, which was her day for going to the gardens. Those days, he showed her out of the shop, as if to emphasise the care he expected her to exercise on her journey.

  It was hard to know what to make of the new girl, Jessie Sandle, who sat at one of the tables in the afternoon sun, writing a letter. As a rule, Violet wouldn’t let the girls sprawl around the place when they weren’t working, but this one had come in and asked her in a polite way if she could just sit down for half an hour and get a letter off to her mother. It was on the tip of Violet’s tongue to tell her to go to the library, but there was nobody about, and she guessed the girl hadn’t got any space to call her own.

  Violet looked at the girl, pen poised over her pad, a frown between her eyes, as if by sitting there and looking out over the water, she could work out what was troubling her. Not that Violet had any difficulty seeing what it was — an overpossessive mother somewhere in the background, she’d be bound. She sighed to herself. Jessie had that pinched look that nothing but sex would cure, and she was plain. They worried her, these young women she employed. One day they’d be up, another down, one would have her period and make all the excuses in the world not to work, as if she, Violet Trench, had never suffered women’s ills. And then there’d be fallings out, and they wouldn’t want to work in the same space. She’d made it a rule, right from the beginning: take the job or leave it, and do it my way. In the end, it was the best thing she could do for them, she’d decided. These girls came from the school of hard knocks and there would be plenty more problems out there waiting for them. Either they could learn to deal with the world and its gin traps or go under. None of them would thank her in the long run if she let them make excuses for themselves.

  The girl leaned over the pad and began to write again, a tear sliding down her thin cheek. That was the moment that John came in, and Violet saw right away how his eyes rested on Jessie. And she saw something else, that from where he stood, the girl wasn’t so plain. Her frizzy hair was pulled up on the top of her head, and caught in a band, exposing her neck. The blouse Jessie wore was familiar, she’d seen it on Marianne, and although Jessie was taller by nearly a head, the garment was too big for her, sliding down to reveal her shoulder. Violet was reminded of one of Constable’s rare figure paintings, the nape of a girl’s neck, so sexy and vulnerable, so pale and faintly marked with downy hair, that you instantly wanted to reach out and stroke it.

  John’s eyes were fastened on the beautiful neck, and Violet thought, well, it wouldn’t be such a bad thing. It could be worse.

  When Jessie looked back, she would wonder why she hadn’t simply left home and got a bedsit of her own, like the clever carefree girls she’d met in Wellington. Much further on in her life, she would conclude that she had stayed home for as long as she had because of an outraged sense of pity for her mother, and that she had left because she was eighteen and the thought of enduring pity, for herself and anyone else, was unbearable. Yet even on the bus going north, the day that she’d left, she had begun to regret the impulse that had brought her to this point of running away. Already, she missed the odd erratic loving mother who had transported her from one rooming house to another until they found sanctuary under Jock Pawson’s roof. She sometimes believed she could remember whole conversations and stories that she had been told by her mother when she was a very young child, pushed against the wind in her pram, shopping bags flapping from the handle. Now when she thought about her mother, she found it hard to recall her face, as if some trick of memory had erased it and left nothing but her voice.

  Dear Mum,

  I wonder if you could send me some of my summer clothes. It looks as if I’m going to be here a bit longer. The postal note is to cover postage. The pay’s not great but there’s plenty of overtime. I should get some money saved up for next year.

  Love, Jessie

  For what next year, she wondered, as she wrote the Wellington address on the envelope and patched a stamp in the corner.

  The house where Marianne had a room and a share of the bathroom, so long as she didn’t take a shower more than every second day, was down a side street between the main street and the swimming baths. The carpet crawled with floribunda roses.

  The night Hugo died, Marianne had said to Jessie, ‘Well, you have to stay somewhere. There’s a spare bed in the room where I stay.’

  ‘I thought there might have been a Y somewhere, like in Wellington.’

  Marianne had snorted through her finely flared nose. ‘Young Women’s Christian Association. You won’t find that around here. Unless you want to go home to Belle’s, which is a Christian association I’d be inclined to give a miss.’

  The beds in the room they shared were covered by pink candlewick bedspreads with crisp worn tufts. The mattresses dipped in the centre when the beds were tightly made up. If Jessie and Marianne were to reach out their hands from their beds at the same time, their fingers would meet in the middle of the room. Not that they did this.

  Three mornings a week, Marianne got up early and went out. She said she was doing some modelling work on the
side. The assignments were a secret. All she would say is that it got damned cold out there in the dew, and that she was going to leave town as soon as she’d got some money together. If Violet found out she was leaving, she might give her the sack.

  ‘Where will you go?’ Jessie asked.

  ‘I’d like to go on the stage, get some training in drama, if I can find someone to teach me. I was Columbine in the school play, and I brought the house down. You should do something about yourself, Jessie. You’re really quite attractive.’

  In the mornings, after Marianne had gone, Jessie tidied up the piles of clothing lying on the floor and used the Hoover the landlady left in the passage to vacuum up loose threads and face powder and hair clips that Marianne had left lying around, and wiped down the surface of the dressing table with a damp rag. It reminded her of home.

  ‘Well, that’s something,’ the landlady said, watching her out of the corner of her eye one morning, when she replaced the Hoover. ‘You should have seen the pigsty they made of the sitting room.’

  Jessie didn’t know who the landlady was talking about. There were two other boarders in the house, David Finke, the young man from the radio station, and Kevin who was the pay clerk in the Forestry Department. Kevin was a stubby middle-aged man with puffy cheeks. He was engaged to be married, and soon, thank God, he would be transferred away. Kevin used the sitting room nowadays, and Marianne not at all.

  ‘It’s a bit amusing,’ the landlady said, watching Jessie at work with the Hoover, ‘her going off to clean up someone else’s mess, while you clean up hers. At least she gets paid.’

  ‘But, I thought …’ Jessie began, and then stopped. The modelling was a secret.

  ‘This is a quality house,’ the landlady said, ‘there’ll be no more shenanigans.’ So something had happened here, but Jessie didn’t know what it was, didn’t think it would be right to ask. She sensed Marianne’s relief when she came back to the order she had created.