Songs from the Violet Cafe Read online

  The house where Hester and Ruth lived spoke of faded affluence and charm, a bungalow with a Spanish Mission influence, its walls clad with white stucco. Although the garden was more or less abandoned, there were outlines of scattered vegetable garden plots, and late grape hyacinths sheltering beneath overgrown hedges. Inside the house, dark brown curtains with braided fringes almost covered the windows, creating constant dimness. The lampshades were strung with crystal beads, and their dull pumpkin light glimmered on round inlaid and brass tables from the East. A servery hatch divided the kitchen from the dining room and alongside it stood a tea wagon. Hester worked at her sewing on the oak dining-room table, with its barley-twist legs. Each day before she began, she laid a heavy felt overlay on the table to protect its surface.

  Her fiancé Owen came in from the farm where he worked, which grazed a bit of livestock for slaughter, as well as running a dairy herd. He appeared mostly on Tuesdays when he was on his way to the cattle sales. Owen was tall and fair, and people seemed to think he was nice-looking, except for his lazy left eye, which made his gaze travel in two different directions. When he came into the room where Hester was working, she got up at once from whatever she was doing, putting her face up to be kissed.

  Owen brought eggs, and sometimes a piece of meat from the farm, which he thought perhaps Hester and her mother could use. (He spoke with determined cheerfulness whenever Ruth was mentioned.) He stayed and made cups of tea and told Hester about butterfat and which paddocks he needed to put the cows in the next day. She asked him to measure windows so that she could start running up curtains for the cottage, and chivvied him along about deciding on his best man. She frowned and sighed over his first choice because, she said, he might be too short for Susan when it came to the photographs. Not that it really mattered, she supposed, seeing that it was Owen’s very best friend, and that was all that mattered. Susan was a girl she knew at boarding school. She lived for sport — hockey in the winter and cricket in the summer. What with practice and one thing and another, she hadn’t had time to make the trip from the Waikato for a fitting of her dress. Hester was sure this would all get sorted out sooner or later. Soon her conversation with Owen resumed its normal rhythms, going round and round, as if they so liked the sound of each other’s voices that there was no need to think of new things to say. They talked about ballroom dancing and tangos, and sometimes they stood holding each other and did little bouncing skipping sorts of dances, pointing their heads and arms from side to side, and humming under their breaths.

  ‘What will you do when you’ve finished all this?’ Owen asked, pointing at the froth of tulle and lace on the table.

  ‘Well,’ said Hester, stopping in the middle of a turn, ‘there’s this girl who’s come to work at the café who doesn’t seem to have anything to wear. I thought I could help her out.’

  ‘Don’t you have enough to do?’

  ‘I feel rather sorry for her. I think she should go home, she doesn’t really seem to fit in here,’ Hester said.

  ‘I don’t think you should get involved,’ Owen said, unusually sharp for him.

  ‘Oh sweetheart, I only want to help.’

  ‘It’s time you got away from it all. I wish we could just slip off and get married now without a fuss.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, sweetheart,’ Hester said, in a fond daffy voice. She and Owen had been engaged for five years, and she’d been looking forward to a summer wedding all those days and nights.

  Mid-afternoon at the Violet Café, early summer perched on the lake, the blueness of the sky melting into the water. That water so still the black swans repeated themselves in perfect mirror reflection, their necks elongated in space.

  Jessie came to pick up her pay because it was Thursday, the day wages were paid, and also the day her rent was due at the boarding house. Violet looked her up and down. ‘You look as if you’ll snap off in the middle. Cook yourself something.’

  ‘Oh, it’s all right,’ Jessie said, blushing as she spoke.

  ‘Don’t tell me you’re not hungry.’

  It was true, Jessie did feel hungry most of the time, although she found it hard to identify this cavity within as hunger. It was more like rage, and a shapeless sense of desire. She would look back and think that this was what homesickness must feel like. She would never experience this feeling again; in the rest of her life she would become a person who was where she was in a given moment, someone who moved on from place to place, her home often just an address in a phone book in another country. For the moment, she was willing to put this feeling down to hunger of the old-fashioned variety. She and Marianne sometimes ate beans out of tins they heated on the kitchen stove at the boarding house, or leftovers at the Violet Café, scraping sauce from the pots before Belle put them in the wash, a cold piece of fish, the dregs of vichyssoise, washed down with black coffee or a slug of the teapot wine.

  Now that she was being offered food of her choice, Jessie felt overwhelmed with a sudden longing for steak, one of those fat ones she served Violet’s patrons.

  ‘If you’re sure,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, go on,’ Violet said. ‘Help yourself.’

  Jessie opened the door of the purring Frigidaire and took out a steak, weighing up half a pound of beef in her hand. The meat was a lovely clear colour that she could only describe as meat-red, faintly marbled with fat. With a jolt, she remembered Jock Pawson’s habit of saying, ‘If a working man can’t have half a pound of steak once a week there’s no point in going out to work.’ He had fillet steak on Friday nights while the rest of them ate mince. Jessie chose a gleaming pot hanging from the rail above the stove.

  Violet followed her into the kitchen. ‘You’re not going to put steak into that cold pan?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Jessie said, almost dropping it. Had she been too greedy? Was she supposed to have chosen something less? An egg, perhaps.

  ‘Cooking is about science,’ Violet said. ‘You learned some science?’

  ‘Yes, some. Although languages and history were what I did best.’

  ‘And then you set yourself to the law?’

  ‘It seemed like a good career.’

  ‘And now it doesn’t. Never mind. I learned music when I was a girl, and you might say that’s irrelevant now. Music. Poetry. The sciences. They’re not so far removed from each other, though the science of cooking isn’t taught as such, more’s the pity. What do they call cooking at school — homecraft or some such? Something you take in the first year of high school unless you’re considered dull, in which case you make a career out of baking cakes and stitching hems in preparation for the great day of marriage. Or you’re so terrified of succeeding that, if you’re like Hester, you immerse yourself in stitching up dream worlds. Cooking isn’t just the craft of the moment, it’s a lifelong commitment. To cook, you need some science.’

  ‘Really?’ Jessie said, her appetite receding.

  ‘Cooking’s a simple process of changing the physical and chemical character of certain foods by exposing them to the action of heat,’ Violet continued. ‘For example, what is a steak?’

  ‘Beef.’ The flesh in her hands was springy and smeared with a light skin of blood. She wished she could put it back in the refrigerator and close the door. Violet took the pan Jessie had chosen, and placed it on the stove, turning up the heat beneath.

  ‘Indeed, that’s beef,’ Violet said, ‘but steak can be veal or ham or lamb, almost any large animal you can think of. If you reduce your steak to scientific language, it’s protein or albumin. It’s like the white of an egg. If you expose it to heat it coagulates and shrinks. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jessie, ‘Should I add butter?’

  ‘Yes, good.’ Violet handed her a pound of yellow butter, showing her where to cut off a chunk. ‘Not too much. Now, let it melt until it begins to turn brown, don’t mind a little smoke. The butter keeps the meat from burning, because fat is an insulator. The steak won’t burn unless the fat does. Now, qu
ickly, put the steak in the pan, for another minute. The heat will turn the butter into acrolein, which smells like a hot exhaust pipe. Hot but not too hot. If you start with low heat, the meat won’t get that caramelised texture outside, the lovely juices.’

  Her discomfort forgotten, Jessie was transfixed by the meat transforming before her, as if she was seeing food cook for the first time. The smell was making her dizzy with pleasure. Like that first day, when John had cooked for her. As the juices eddied round the sides of the pan Violet reached over and turned down the stove.

  ‘Now it’s ready to eat,’ Violet said, lifting the steak from the pan with a slotted spoon. She scraped the sides, pouring the fragrant sauce beside the steak. ‘A dash of salt, a grind of pepper — go on, take it.’

  A shadow had fallen across the doorway. Violet stiffened, without looking up.

  ‘What do you want, Lou?’

  Lou Messenger leaned against the reception desk, an amused look hovering in his eyes, a cigarette balanced by the tip of his tongue beneath his upper lip. Jessie sat down at a table with her plate and began to eat.

  ‘Whatever it is, you can’t have it,’ Violet said to Lou, her voice sharp.

  ‘I was thinking of a float in a boat, that’s all. It’s a nice day out there.’

  ‘There’re no girls here.’ Violet glanced across at Jessie. ‘Only this one.’

  All the same, Jessie did go out on Lou’s boat, though not that day. It was an eighteen-foot kauri cabin cruiser painted white, with its name The Wench painted in scarlet letters on the bow. It had a square cabin and, beneath that, two big portholes on either side. The back was open, so that three or four people could sit outside.

  Jessie had thought that Evelyn would come with them, but she didn’t. Evelyn and Marianne’s friendship puzzled her. Jessie had heard it said several times that they were best friends at school and that Marianne had often spent time at the Messenger house in the past. Yet Marianne kept her distance from Evelyn, as if she didn’t really want to talk to her. Jessie saw how unhappy this made Evelyn, and couldn’t work out what was going on between them. Often, Evelyn would speak to Marianne in a way that indicated some old easy familiarity, and Marianne would turn away. More than once, Jessie had seen the rush of tears in Evelyn’s dark chocolaty eyes, which she blinked away, before her stony mask fell again.

  The day that Marianne and Jessie went out on Lou’s boat, it turned out that Evelyn and her mother had gone up to Auckland, so Evelyn could enrol for her university courses in the new year. Whenever she mentioned the word university in the kitchen, it had been with a tilt of her head, as if it were something unattainable for the rest of them. Jessie hadn’t mentioned how she had spent the past year, and she didn’t think Violet Trench had either.

  Marianne was already on board the boat, her head wrapped in a long gold paisley scarf that also wound about her throat, the ends flying over each shoulder, sunglasses veiling her eyes, her mouth framed with fresh lipstick. In a few minutes they were joined by John, carrying a bag of clanking beer bottles.

  ‘You need to be warm,’ Marianne said, tossing Jessie a mackintosh from under the seat.

  ‘I’m warm enough,’ Jessie said, because overhead the sun was brilliant.

  Marianne shrugged. ‘It can get cold out here. You’d be surprised.’

  It did too, with a quick wind slapping the water into short choppy waves that dissolved in the boat’s long wake. Lou spun the boat this way and that, looking light-hearted and carefree like a boy, not like a man who had been away to the war. His dark hair, worn slightly longer than the fashion of the time, sprouted in a dark halo as the wind eddied around them. He threw his head back when he laughed.

  Dear Mum,

  I hope things are all right with you. This is an interesting town. Yesterday, the father of one of the girls who works with me took some of us out on his boat. There’s a lot of history about the place, or I guess you’d call it folklore. Like the princess who swam all the way across the lake to the island, in the middle of the night, to find her boyfriend. She had hollowed out gourds strapped to her body, like lifebelts. The lake’s really pretty but you have to treat it with respect. They say the water’s very deep in places, and cold as a frog’s tit even now, as we’re turning into summer. (Yes, I’m getting some bad turns of phrase, that’s Lou for you, Evelyn’s father, the one who’s got the boat. He’s quite young for a father.) This whole bit of country’s pretty wild, squeezed up out of the centre of the earth a few million years ago, like a big tube of toothpaste, and it’s still oozing out. One day they reckon this whole place is going to blow again, like sitting on the top of a pressure cooker. The ground is heated in some places and I’m told carrots get cooked before you can pull them out of the garden. That might or might not be true, but it is a real fact that people are buried at ground level and the tombstones are built over the bodies, because it’s too hot to dig down. Well, it was just the best day out. When we got to the island, we swam in a hot pool. Warm bubbles trickle up from an underground stream and run up your back. I could do with my bathing suit, because I had to swim in my panties and bra which made me feel really undressed, although of course I was perfectly decent. Anyway, I thought about you and wished you could have been here and seen it with me. Mum, it’s about time you had a holiday.

  Love Jessie

  Was that how it really happened? Yes and no. By the time they reached the island, the sun had become clear and hot. Jessie swam in the pool the way she described it to her mother. Marianne and Lou and John swam without any clothes. Of course Jessie had seen Marianne naked before; the intimacy of their room meant that they had little to hide from one another, only, they tended to look away from each other when they shed their clothes. Now, Marianne stretched herself. ‘Sunlight,’ she said. ‘That’s what I want, a bit of sun on my face.’ Her breasts were full and springy, her nipples curved upwards, a blue mark the size of a thumbprint or a mouth beside the left one. Lou glanced at her with a puzzled frown, and looked away.

  The men cast their windcheaters and slacks aside, stacking them beside the girls’ clothes, and slid one by one into the water, holding towels from the boat over their waists. Still, as they dropped the towels, Jessie saw the smooth way their penises hung between their unevenly shaped balls. As she crouched inside her underclothes, not wanting to be caught looking, she thought they looked strong and somehow touching. Lou stood above her for a moment with the green bush behind him, deep-chested and fit, his penis brown and heavy. John’s was longer and creamier, reminding Jessie of a bud lily as it swayed in its nest of black hair. He could be a dancer, he was so slim. His hands fanned out in a quick dramatic gesture, covering himself.

  ‘What green eyes you’ve got,’ said Marianne. Jessie blushed and looked away. The two men stayed at the end of the pool while Marianne and Jessie lay against the smooth rocks at the other side.

  ‘I like to have young people around,’ Lou said, in a mock fatherly voice.

  ‘You’re not old,’ said Marianne.

  ‘Old enough to tell you when to go to bed.’

  Marianne eyed Jessie sideways. ‘Evelyn and I used to have midnight feasts at their house. He was always telling us off. Not that it will matter when I’m forty. People don’t notice things like that, the older you get.’

  ‘Steady on,’ Lou said, ‘a joke’s a joke.’ He changed the subject then, talking about the war instead, telling them how it was to travel in a submarine and know there was nothing except the skin of a machine between you and a million million tons of the ocean pressing down, and what it was like when you released a missile, and it hit, and you were so glad you weren’t the poor bastard on the receiving end, the fear of the lights going out, and being left there in the dark, and what it was like to come back up to the surface after days near the ocean’s floor.

  As Jessie climbed out of the water on to the rocks, she noticed that her skin had turned a dull puce. I’m cooked, she thought, I’m boiled meat. Not on Violet’s menu
. She sat down and started to shiver, in spite of the warmth of the pool and the sunshine. John got out of the water, drying himself with one of the damp towels, his back towards her. She couldn’t see Marianne and Lou, who were already out and dressed.

  ‘Jessie,’ he said, pulling his clothes on. ‘What is it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You need a cigarette.’

  ‘Thanks,’ she said.

  ‘Where are the others?’

  ‘Gone for a walk.’

  ‘I don’t know what’s going on here.’ The air was quite still around her, and somewhere she thought she heard a raised voice but perhaps it was something else.

  ‘I think they were looking for nesting birds.’

  ‘Are we doing couples or something?’ she said.

  ‘Would it matter if we were?’ He had thrown himself on the grass beside the pool. Leaning on his elbows, he stretched a blade of it between his thumbs and whistled gently into it.

  ‘Lou’s married. He’s Evelyn’s father.’

  ‘I wouldn’t worry about it. Are you scared of doing things?’ He hadn’t made any move to reach for her. And, as he was speaking, Marianne and Lou appeared along the path. Lou’s face was dark, the friendliness erased, and Marianne looked as if she had been crying.

  ‘Come on, shake a leg,’ Lou said, ‘I’ve still got that stuff to pick up for her ladyship.’

  On the return journey across the lake, they veered away from the town, towards the eastern apron. Two men stood at the water’s edge, waving. Behind them was a ramshackle cottage, partly covered with vines, a window boarded up and a chimney pot broken. A row of trees grew near the cottage; in the falling evening light, it was shading a garden planted in neat rows almost to the rim of sand. Closer up, Jessie saw one man was covered with a thick red and black woollen shirt, black trousers and black waders. He had a big loose frame, and a fair open face. Both he and the other man, older and darker, carried wooden boxes on their shoulders. The second man was Chinese, dressed in old trousers, baggy at the knees, and a faded evening jacket. The men lifted the boxes up to John. The first was full of green lettuces. ‘Be careful of this one,’ the Chinese man said, ‘it’s Madam’s salads.’ When he spoke, a solid gold tooth glinted in his mouth.