Songs from the Violet Cafe Read online

  At first, she stood on the street, in Auckland, looking up and down, thinking that it had been such a long time since she and her husband had seen each other, that they had walked past each other, without recognition. Her sons stood huddled beside her like babies as they sensed her alarm. She saw others who had travelled with her being met. Chun Yee must surely be waiting for her.

  ‘Where are the husbands?’ she asked a woman who seemed at ease, as if she already lived there. ‘There must be more husbands.’

  The woman spoke to her in Mandarin. ‘Are you the wife of Chun Yee?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ming, her heart already full of dread.

  ‘It’s too late,’ the woman said, shaking her head. ‘My husband went to Chun Yee’s funeral last week. Your husband is dead.’

  ‘How can that be?’ Ming said, thinking that it might be a trick. The boys clutched their boxes more firmly. The elder one, who was ten, stood up straight, trying to make his head level with his mother’s.

  ‘Come quickly,’ the woman said, ‘or they will send you back. Tomorrow we’ll find the papers to show that he’s dead. If they catch you on the street without a husband you’ll be in trouble. They’ll send you back for sure.’

  That night Ming and her sons sheltered with the woman’s family, in a house in Freeman’s Bay, where her husband had an opium and pakapoo house. She felt as if she were dead too: afterwards, she told her second husband, it was as if I was dead, there is nothing anyone can do to someone who has been already dead. See, I have a strong spirit that was brought back so that I could be with you. I know what it is like to be already dead. I did not like it dead, but it is bearable. She talked to the men who came to visit the house, about the last days of Chun Yee, and how he had died of tuberculosis. Yes, he knew he was sick when he wrote to her, they said, but he thought that when she came he would get better. In the morning, she went to the Births, Deaths and Marriages office to get Chun Yee’s death certificate.

  ‘Does immigration know about this?’ asked the man behind the counter.

  Ming shook her head. She didn’t know which of the five hundred words were the right ones with which to answer him. ‘Sorry,’ she said.

  ‘You’re in trouble,’ said the man. ‘Big trouble. You know trouble?’

  ‘I know much trouble,’ said Ming in a low voice.

  Behind her in the queue stood a man who had also come about a death certificate, for his wife. His long thin face might have been humorous at another time, nice-looking, although his mouth was full of crooked teeth.

  ‘Be kind to her,’ he said to the official behind the desk. ‘Can’t you see, she’s just had a shock?’ He returned her gaze when she looked at him with her grave steadfast eyes that said I have nowhere to go.

  ‘Wait for me,’ he said.

  Ming’s body was not much thicker now than when he met her, a tiny blade of a woman. She harboured strength, in much the same way as he remembered in Violet. She makes two of him, whatever they do. Sometimes he blushed to remember the beginning of their time together, when he first lay down with her as his new wife. He had touched her as if she were a porcelain doll to whom he had no rights at all, and she responded as if she were a knife that had to strip away his own delicacy and pare him down to the truth of his own needs. As she unplaited her hair over her bare light sepia back, it was she who put her fingers to her lips, Do not be afraid. They have had a son of their own, as well as Ming’s boys. Too old, he said at first with a self-deprecating pride, I’m too old. Later, he just said it to himself, with a small astonished murmur, because she didn’t like him saying this. He did not say, what will they make of me, this old man from a shack at the edge of the lake with his rakes and hoes, but he knew, even before it happened, that his children would burn their report cards and letters from teachers, rather than have him turn up at the school.

  The town where he took her was a bustling place in the summer where tourists came to visit, or at least they did before the war, to take in the thermal sights and enjoy spas in pretty gilded buildings. The visitors stayed in huge hotels with high ceilings and chandeliers, smoking rooms and dining rooms set with crystal and silver, glamorous flower arrangements and liveried waiters; they looked across the streets from their balconies, strolled on the streets, so that you could close your eyes for a moment and think that you were in some other place. At the dazzling blue-and-white-tiled swimming baths, there were tearooms and a band that played jazz. He took his children when they were small but Ming stayed at home. The local people lived in comfortable bungalows spilling this way and that from a railway line carved out of the makeshift changing landscape, or, if they were Maori, near the lakes where they caught fish. The lakes and streams and tributaries spilled out across the countryside, filled with rising trout. When it was dark, the Maori sang, their voices travelling across the surfaces of the water. It was a place where it was possible to live unnoticed if you kept quiet and looked straight ahead when you walked down the main street. But cold, it got cold in the winter.

  When he first met Ming nobody could afford luxuries like piano tuning, but now that it was wartime, everyone wanted their pianos to sing for them. His hearing, though, was all but gone, the part of his listening skill that followed a scale like an animal after its prey, separating one interval from another. None of this worried Ming, the woman from Huang Shan, the Yellow Mountain. Slowly he learned of her past, of the mountain shrouded with mist and pine trees and fantastic rocks, of her favourite peak, Shi Xin Feng, the Beginning to Believe Peak, of her work in the rice fields, the growing and preparation of food.

  She said she liked it where they lived. It reminded her of home, especially the hot springs, for in her village there were clear springs that maintained a warm steady temperature and never ran dry, even in the worst droughts, of which there were many; times when poor people like her came close to starvation. She had seen the springs and the sapling pine trees that grew in plantations as a sign that this was where they should seek land for a market garden. It will be all right, she told him, if I stay with you I will find food and harmony enough for both of us. Music that came from a piano was music made by man, she believed, but the sun, the mountains and the earth itself vibrated with never-ending frequencies. The seventh dragon is the dragon that listens, she said. You must not let the dragon lie down just because you can’t fix the black boxes that stand in the corner of ladies’ parlours. Ming had never attended a concert, had no wish to. She was unmoved by Western music, but not, she insisted, by music itself. He thought of that, watching the oars dipping and rising as the other woman rowed towards him across the mirror-glass lake and supposed that, even at this minute, he was hearing a kind of music, coming closer and increasingly persistent. When she was a child, he had tuned the piano at her parents’ house. It was an ordinary enough little instrument but when it was tuned the child, Violet, produced a sound radiant with possibility. I sound awful, she would complain when he turned up at her house on his travels through the country (for he was a known expert in those days and it was only his friendship with her father that took him to the out-of-the-way place where they lived). When he left Violet absorbed over the keyboard, he thought it was worth the visit, even though he wasn’t paid. He never thought of not returning.

  ‘Tell me,’ Ming asked, ‘who is coming? Who is this woman?’

  ‘She’s the person who wrote me a letter,’ Hugo told her. ‘The letter that came a while back. I think I mentioned it to you.’ Not that he had read the letter to her, or discussed it. More like an implication that he’d had a letter from an old friend. Nothing much. I used to tune this person’s piano, he might have said. A word of advice, a note of warning. Any of these ways he might have described the letter, but he had said nothing.

  ‘What does she want?’ Ming stood in front of him, making quite sure that he saw her lips making the question.

  ‘I don’t know exactly. She’s in some kind of trouble.’

  ‘That.’ Ming turned away, her vo
ice contemptuous, as if she perceived already that the woman’s difficulties were different from her own. ‘She is sometime wife?’

  ‘Not wife.’ Ming never complained about anything. This transparent note of anger, even jealousy, about a woman she had not met and of whom he had never spoken, was alien and alarming. He had learnt to love Ming, the woman from Yellow Mountain. How could he begin to explain the role this other one had played in his life? Or, in that of Ming herself?

  The woman was now so close he could make out her features, but she rested more often on the oars, as if she had become tired. Or afraid.

  As if reading his thoughts, Ming said, ‘Maybe bad woman.’

  ‘Not,’ he said, straightening himself. ‘Not bad.’ The boat was within hailing distance. A fleet of shoreline ducks followed in its wake. The woman would see smoke rising from the chimney behind them. He had loved three women in his time and two of them were about to meet each other. Inwardly, he cursed himself for his evasion, the way he had put off telling Ming about Violet’s letter.

  ‘Over here,’ he called. Turning to Ming, he said, ‘She’s asked that we look after a child.’

  Ming gave a startled cry. ‘A child? That child?’ Her eyes darted towards the boat, then wildly around the smoking garden as if seeking a way of escape.

  ‘A little boy,’ he said, looking away. ‘Her father was my friend.’

  ‘You knew,’ his wife said. ‘You knew she bring a little boy.’

  He walked towards the water’s edge, the water slopping around the ankles of his rubber boots as he stepped out to catch the bow and bring the boat round, running his hand over the familiar timber. He knew this boat, wondered how she had come by it. The woman looked up at him with those astonishing, brilliant eyes of hers, her mouth, always too large for the oval of her face, parted with exertion. He was shocked to see how roughened and dark her skin had become. She was dressed in a light cotton shirt and trousers, like a man, the pale ash-brown hair, already threaded with grey, tied carelessly behind her head. The collar of her shirt was open and he saw that her throat at least was still the colour of an arum lily, remembering the small muscles that rippled there, never still even when she was not talking or laughing.

  ‘Hugo,’ she said, looking up with such pained recognition that he understood again how much he too had changed. She turned to pick up the drowsing child beside her. The boy was perhaps two years old, round-eyed and small-boned with a large head of dense hair supported on the slender thread of his neck, one hand curled over the edge of the blanket wrapped around him. Hugo thought he saw a resemblance between them, but perhaps it was his overheated imagination.

  ‘Moses in the bulrushes,’ she said, pulling a face.

  ‘Violet, this is Ming,’ he said, as his wife advanced on them. Ming had drawn herself up to her full five feet. She glared hard at the woman, almost causing her to turn away.

  ‘You’ve told her?’ Violet said, when Ming didn’t respond to the introduction.

  ‘You have to speak loud,’ Ming said in a scornful voice.

  ‘I haven’t asked her,’ he said, humbled.

  ‘We have enough children here,’ said Ming.

  ‘What a hell of a place to live,’ the woman said, offering up the child. Ming held her arms by her side. ‘Why here?’

  ‘Because of the war,’ Ming said, before he could answer. ‘They think I am Japanese woman.’ She held the other woman’s eye steadily. ‘Japanese, phoo. They know nothing here, they think everyone looks the same.’

  He was taken aback, hearing this blunt statement of the necessity of their lives. Ming had never spoken of her need to be invisible. Sometimes he wondered whether she was even aware of it. Already, he thought, things are changed.

  ‘You will come into our house, please,’ Ming said to their visitor.

  ‘I don’t want to stay,’ said the woman. She spoke to Ming more loudly than was necessary, as if it was she who was hard of hearing, then flushed when she realised what she had done. She tried to speak more evenly. ‘I’ve come to bring the boy. His name is Wing Lee.’

  ‘Your baby?

  ‘My friend’s child. I’ve told your husband, he knows about him.’ Despite her determination, her voice had begun to rise in a shrill and frantic way. ‘Take him quickly. I can’t stay. I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to get here but the ship was holed on the way out from England, it was terrible, it was taking water and we were going for the lifeboats but the captain told us to hold on harder, and we were rescued. We slept on the deck of a dirty little steamer that took weeks to get here. I can’t tell you how bad it’s been.’

  ‘I think this is your child.’ Ming’s words were flat and unfriendly.

  ‘As I said. My friend’s child. I can’t keep him in London, there are bombs falling all the time, and my daughter’s gone to the country.’

  ‘So. You have a child already?’

  ‘A girl of my own. Yes.’

  ‘But this child. He is a Chinese baby, like my youngest one, a little Chinese, a little not Chinese.’

  ‘His mother is dead, she was killed by the bombs. Whoosh. Boom.’

  ‘There’s no need for that,’ said Hugo sharply. ‘She understands what a bomb is.’

  The woman coloured again. ‘I’m sorry, Hugo.’

  ‘So,’ Ming said, ‘you can come many miles far, but you cannot keep your friend’s child. You’d better come inside now.’

  Hugo lifted Wing Lee out of the woman’s arms, although for a moment the child fought him, clinging to Violet. When he had prised him away, Hugo cradled his head against his shoulder. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said to Violet, ‘but you see how it is. There’s a way it must be done. She won’t just take him in.’

  ‘Not even if you tell her to?’

  He allowed himself a smile. ‘Things are all very equal here.’

  ‘A modern household. Well, it’s not what I expected.’

  They followed Ming into the house.

  Don’t go, he had said when Violet prepared to leave, the day after Magda’s funeral. I need you here. When he thought about it now, he was ashamed of that weak moment of longing. Looking back, he thought how piteous he must have sounded. All the same, he had pleaded with her. I know it’s not right with Magda just gone but, well, you know how it is, a fellow gets lonely on his own. When she was silent, he’d said, you feel it too, I can tell. They were sitting in the bay window of the small bungalow he rented in Ponsonby, looking out on a clutter of ramshackle cottages with wet washing flapping on the clotheslines.

  Don’t be silly, Hugo, she said then, I’ve got all my life worked out. I’ve had time to think.

  What was it, he wanted to know. What sort of life?

  A reckless life, she told him, and he remembered the rich way she laughed, as if she had grown up and grown away even then.

  As she walked shoulder to shoulder with him from the shore of the lake towards the house, he thought that’s how it will have been. Reckless. But not without regrets. I’d do anything for you, he told her when she left. Anything at all. Only, now he was to be put to the test, he didn’t know whether he could deliver. He was married to a woman of such strong disposition that once she made up her mind it was almost impossible to change it.

  He’d asked Ming, more than once, how she had survived all those years on her own, that period of her life when she was in China and she was a wife but not a wife.

  Through meditation and discipline, she told him. I went to the mountain for inspiration. More than that. She had gone underground into the caves, with hundreds of people at a time, fasting in total darkness, only a ration of water and an apple to sustain them. Her spirit was purged, tempered, ready for what might befall her. She was not like the reed in her picture that hung in its shabby splendour above the smoking fireplace. She didn’t bend this way and that.

  Ming took her place at the wooden bench that ran down one side of the main room, picking up a knife with a long flashing blade to continue the task of food pre
paration, begun earlier in the day. She took a handful of green vegetables from a bin and chopped them on a board with long hard strokes. ‘Always, there is a friend,’ she said, tossing the remark over her shoulder.

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Violet.

  ‘I told her you were the daughter of my friend,’ Hugo said.

  Ming took two plucked ducks from a platter, their heads and beaks still attached to their bodies, and rinsed them in a bowl of bloodied water. ‘Friends,’ she said, derisively.

  ‘That was all,’ he said, finally provoked into reminding her that he was, after all, her husband. ‘She wants us to take this baby and care for him, because her husband’s at war and he’s been injured. Soon he’ll come back from the hospital and Violet will have to be free to look after him. She’ll give us some money now and send more each month.’

  Ming cleared fat from the birds’ body and neck cavities. She mixed chopped onion and celery with spices and a dash of rationed sugar, and soy sauce tipped out of a Mason jar. Violet opened a thin canvas purse slung over her shoulder and extracted a wad of notes. ‘There’s three hundred pounds here.’ She laid the money out on the table in front of them.

  Ming eyed the money, her eyes at once covetous and contemptuous. It was easy to see how much she wanted the money, how much easier it would make their lives. ‘I think,’ she said. ‘After food, I tell you.’