Songs from the Violet Cafe Read online

  ‘I wish Marianne would leave the café,’ Derek said. ‘She could get a proper job.’ Derek himself worked in the bank across the road. He was head teller but soon they would be moving him up to accounts.

  Sybil saw why her daughter yearned for this young man, his murmuring in her ear, and no doubt the sex she assumed had already begun. She could see them together if she imagined it, and she did. He was slightly shorter than Sybil, and than her daughter for that matter, but he had hard young muscles and a strong chest. He played rugby in the weekends. The local newspaper had singled him out as a prospect for a provincial side. She liked men that shape, like barrels with slim hips, especially when they were clothed in nice suits. In some ways he reminded her of Lou Messenger, until recently her lover, although Lou was a more casual sort of man. Thinking of Lou made her heave a small inward sigh of regret. He sold sports goods and fishing tackle, and he was afraid his wife was getting suspicious. That’s what he told her. She understood. This sort of thing happened.

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘Well. The way Violet Trench talks you’d think she was offering the best job in the world down at that café. Of course, Madame’s decidedly above herself, but still she’s got class, I’ll give her that, a bit of style.’

  ‘Marianne might as well work in the pub. All sorts of things go on at that place.’

  ‘Oh come on, Derek, it’s not so bad.’ Her lunch finished, Sybil folded the brown paper bag into a little square and dropped it in the rubbish bin at her feet. She considered her fingernails, which were buffed and smoothed, the cuticles pushed back to show her strong crescent moons. It was better to take things slowly she decided. This man is not in a hurry to marry, she thought, rubbing the nail with the pad of her thumb. ‘Anyway, what would Marianne do?’

  ‘She’s artistic,’ he said, with a touch of irritation. ‘Perhaps she could try teaching, they do lots of art and stuff.’

  ‘She’d have to go away to do that, go away to get trained.’

  ‘Yes I suppose she would.’

  ‘What you mean,’ said Sybil, ‘is that you want a long engagement. I’m surprised.’

  ‘I don’t know whether she’s ready for all that stuff yet, settling down and everything.’ Derek’s tone was flat.

  ‘You know she’s mad about you,’ Sybil said. ‘I mean, what more do you want?’

  When he didn’t reply straight away, she said, ‘Well, it’s solid work, banking. A good career.’ What she meant was, he was respectable and careful. He would become a pillar of the community. He might settle for less than her beautiful daughter, someone with two parents who already had a pastel bathroom of their own. While she was still looking and wondering how far she could stretch the deposit, and how long it would be before she was free of Marianne and could buy one of those nice little one-bedroom flats that she came across now and then in the course of her work. It occurred to her that Derek wouldn’t play rugby for much longer. If he had really wanted to be a top player it would probably have happened already. What he wanted, she believed, was to run a bank. If she was any sort of mother, she would warn Marianne, tell her to do something about it, get pregnant, anything at all. She felt a momentary pang of profound regret. It was not Marianne he had to fear, but a mother without scruples, a divorced woman. Sybil pushed her gold bracelets up her arm and smiled sideways at him. ‘Seven o’ clock then, we’ll expect you.’

  Only, when she got home, Marianne had left a note with the landlady to say she had been called for work. (The landlady took calls if they concerned work. Her tenants did have the rent to pay.) This was more or less what Sybil had expected, given that Belle, who cleaned the café, had become so erratic, as Marianne had described it. She didn’t like it, any more than Derek, that Marianne sometimes did cleaning work as well as waitressing at the Violet Café. Sybil knew she should throw herself upon the landlady’s forbearance, and ask to use the phone. But the house was quiet, as if she had gone out. There were other tenants in the house, but she thought they must be out too. At least it was a relief not to hear the bad-tempered woman banging around in the kitchen while she boiled meat. Sybil could have gone down to the telephone box on the corner and phoned Derek. He would have had time to go home and change out of his suit into slacks and a pullover as he did most nights before he came to see Marianne. Sometimes the couple would go to the pictures, or they would just go for a drive in his Hillman Hunter. When she came home, Marianne’s eyes were always alight, her perfectly shaped top teeth taking excited little bites of her lower lip, as if something momentous had just taken place.

  Sybil knew she shouldn’t let him visit for nothing. She sat down in a wicker chair with a big cushion behind her and took off her high heels, stretching her nylon-clad legs in front of her. There had been two near sales this week and she was tired of showing people the master bedroom and raving about the size of the linen cupboard. Soon she would have a gin and tonic. She should have something to eat. In the meantime, she would sit for a while and let things take care of themselves. Later on. She couldn’t pretend she wasn’t waiting for his knock.

  When she opened the door to him, she told herself it was all part of an old, old story and you could make up different endings to suit yourself. On another day it would be different. Sybil lay down on the bed in her room with her daughter’s lover and spread herself beneath him, her voluptuous mouth covering him in kisses, and that was where Marianne, who had forgotten her flat-heeled shoes for work, found her very soon after.

  That was last autumn and now it was nearly spring and Marianne hadn’t seen her mother since. In the evenings, Marianne told herself it was good to be free, not tied to anyone.

  WALLACE AND BELLE, AND LORRAINE SEEN FROM A DISTANCE

  When Belle’s fiancé, Wallace, had found God it was as if a great white light had been turned on. The light just kept burning and burning with an intensity that made him feel as if he glowed when he walked down the street. Perhaps he felt this way because he was an electrician, used to switching light on and off, understanding and yet not understanding the amazing current that illuminated the world. It seemed natural that he saw himself in terms of light, as if a great neon sign had been erected above him. He was surprised people didn’t see him coming. The Lord is truly my Shepherd he said to himself every day. His conversion had begun one night years before when he had gone to hear the word of God preached by Billy Graham, in an Auckland park. At the time, Wallace was hanging out with motorcycle gangs and wore his hair slicked up in a comb. Years later, he learned about movies like Grease and thought them profane, as if glamorising all that bad side of his life was unacceptable. That is just the sort of thing that corrupts people, he would say now, although he knew that sin and corruption crept up in many guises. When he preached, there were things in this life he could draw upon that would make people sit up and listen. They would wonder how he could know as much as he did, a man who kept himself so pure and at one with the Lord. It was that mysterious well of knowledge and understanding that drew the sinful to tell him their innermost secrets. Just like Billy Graham himself. Wallace was with a gang up north at the time Billy Graham came along. This was 1959. There was a girl who used to cruise with the crowd and hitch rides on the back of motor-bikes. She never had much to say for herself but Wallace could tell that he was the one she had set her sights on — she used to gaze at him with adoring eyes. One night when he had been drinking beer at the waterfront, she sat staring at him, tilting her breasts this way and that under a shocking pink sweater and dangling her legs over a bench seat in the park. He remembered her legs in particular, clad in diamond-patterned matador pants. She was looking and acting like a bad girl; it was time he gave her a lesson and showed her how really bad he was.

  ‘I’ll take you out then,’ he said. ‘What do you want to do?’

  She had suddenly looked nervous. ‘I have to be home by ten. I’ll get it if I’m not.’

  He hated the way she was backing off. Teasing him, he reckoned. ‘Decide for yourself
, we can get together or go to Billy Graham at the park.’

  He could have sworn she would have opted for sex, she had been hanging out for it now for months.

  ‘I’ll take Billy Graham,’ she said.

  His mates jeered when they left. He tapped his forehead and grinned so that they would know she was about to get what was coming to her. Only, he knew he wouldn’t do it to her. He just didn’t fancy her enough, or perhaps she scared him a little. She was an unknown quantity, the sort who might make trouble if you called her bluff.

  At the gates to the park, thousands of people were moving forward. The girl reached for his hand but he didn’t pick it up, didn’t look back to see where she went or whether she would go into the park without him. But a current of excitement in the air was infecting him, like that feeling of electricity that seemed as normal as breathing when he worked with it; it was just that when he put down his tools for the day and folded away the wires, there seemed to be nothing there inside him. He felt in his bones that something was going to happen, as if the vacuum was about to be filled.

  When he saw the grey-suited man with the handsome lantern jaw (this was how the newspapers described it), and heard him begin to speak, he knew he was right. I’m going to ask you to do something hard, the man said. It’s hard and it’s tough but you can do it. I’m going to ask you to get up out of your seat, and come on this field and stand here quietly, reverently. Come now, it won’t be difficult. There will be hundreds of you, and you know as I speak that it is not me who speaks to you, but God. God has spoken to you. You get up and come. I can hear it in your hearts. You want a new life.

  Wallace looked around for the girl but she was not there. She had brought him here and she should, he thought, at least share this moment. He looked across the sea of faces, intent, raised and watching the man. When he twisted around, seeking the girl, people raised their fingers as if he might break the spell. He was going to have to go to God on his own. You want to be clean and wholesome for Christ, Billy Graham said. The Lord has spoken to you. Now you just get right out of your seats and come on … come on … you are not on your own, your friends are coming with you.

  In the background a choir robed in white had begun to sing Just as I am, without one plea, dear Lord and dear Lord, he was on his feet and going towards the man.

  And, after one quick glance backwards, he never looked back. After that, he knew only pure women and girls, like Belle Hunter, the pastor’s daughter.

  Once he had walked off on his journey towards eternity, his old friends behind him, things happened quickly. He bought himself a grey suit of his own and several snow-white shirts so that he could be sure of having a clean pressed one every day, he put a carnation in his buttonhole, and had his fair hair, which his mother used to call golden when he was a child, cut short back and sides. Preaching was a gift he never knew he had in him. When he stood up and told people about the things he saw, about the magnetic forces of electricity and the way it was all part of God’s plan to light up every corner of the world, from the darkness of Africa and its benighted people to the black soul of the big cities where evil resided, it was like magic.

  He was invited to preach in a town further south, where a man called Hal Hunter was conducting a prayer meeting. It was winter and there was rain in the air which combined with the rising volcanic steam at the edge of the racecourse, where the meeting was being held, to create eerie mists and shadows around them. He shivered inside the new double-breasted coat that he wore over the grey suit. Then Hal began to speak and told them about the Church of Twenty, which was his very own creation.

  Twenty seeds are all I need, he told them. Each seed will go forth and find twenty more, and each of those another twenty, and the word of God will spread like wildfire. You’ll hear it in the streets and from the mountain tops, you’ll hear it spoken by the wise old men (not a word about wise old women) and children. It will be the song that carries us all forward until the end of time and the new creation. You hear me?

  We hear you, the crowd called back. Then Hal called on Wallace to speak of his experiences, and the way the light had been turned on for him, and before long everyone was shouting Praise the Lord every time he paused for breath. He knew just how well he had done when Mr Hunter invited him home for supper. His daughter, who was called Belle, was only fourteen at the time but he fell in love with her on the spot. Belle rode in the car beside him on the way back to the Hunter place, Mr Hunter driving and Mrs Hunter beside him. Belle had big blue eyes that you noticed straight away, very fair hair that she wore long and wavy round her shoulders. As soon as they went into the house, she went to the kitchen and began helping her mother lay out a supper of sausage rolls and custard squares.

  ‘Sir,’ he stammered, unable to find the words to express how delighted he was by Belle’s appearance, without giving offence. He saw how young she was.

  Hal looked him in the eye, as if seeing right inside him. Wallace blushed, aware that what the pastor saw might be interpreted as carnal desire, a terrible shaming lust for the child, and that the recognition of this stain on his soul could be his undoing. ‘She’ll make a good wife for someone,’ he said.

  Belle’s mother, whose name was Lorraine, paused from her work for an instant, tight-lipped. ‘She’s too young to make a promise,’ she said, in a low quick voice.

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ Hal said, a blaze in his eyes. When she didn’t answer, he said, ‘I think you should go to your room, wife.’

  Immediately, and without another word, Belle’s mother laid down the last of the food and walked out of the room. Wallace glanced at Belle to see if this had upset her, but she seemed undisturbed. She knelt by the fire and poked at a log of wood. Wallace felt excited and stirred by what he had just seen. He could tell that Hal was a man who knew what he wanted, what was best for everyone.

  ‘She’s a very good girl,’ Hal said. ‘You like this man, Belle?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the girl, keeping her eyes downcast, but Wallace saw a smile hovering at the corner of her mouth.

  ‘You’ll have to teach her to be a good wife,’ said Hal.

  ‘Yes sir,’ Wallace said. He wondered how much he would be allowed to teach her before his marriage and how soon her education would begin.

  ‘You got any money?

  ‘Not much, sir.’

  ‘I thought as much. You need money for a ring when she leaves school. A girl needs a good diamond, tells the world she’s worth it to a man. Like a down payment,’ he added, grinning. ‘You have to be able to support her.’

  ‘Oh, I can save up,’ said Wallace. ‘I’ve got a trade. I only preach weekends and evenings as a rule.’

  ‘Good man. Don’t take any nonsense from her. I take too much from that woman down the passage there. She had too much freedom before we found the Lord.’

  Wallace just nodded. Now that the washing up was finished, Belle picked up a piece of needlework and sat down beside the fire. Wallace felt helpless, already so in love with his child bride.

  ‘And you keep pure for the wedding, you hear me. No messing around. A goodnight kiss is quite far enough.’

  ‘Yes sir.’ Wallace couldn’t believe God was being so good to him. Later in the night when the house should have been settled in sleep, he heard a thud and a scream inside the house, a voice muffled. He understood that the man was the head of the house and Belle’s mother needed discipline. Belle, swaddled in a long winceyette nightgown, had come to him and demurely offered her cheek for the first of his kisses. He wanted to kiss her and kiss her until she fainted in his arms.

  Out on the street or even in the house helping her mother bottle preserves and cook and clean, she was so quiet you couldn’t hear her move from one place to the next. Her mother had bruised and brooding silences of her own, but Belle’s silence seemed to reflect a happiness he hoped he had inspired. She let him kiss her a great deal, on her lips and on her neck and on the tops of her sweet white breasts. The day before she turned
fifteen he gave her the ring, because she was finishing school the next day and she wanted the girls there to know that she had her future mapped out and waiting; it was the first and last triumph of her school days. By this time, Wallace had given up his trade and only did jobs for friends of Hal’s. The rest of the time he spent learning the Scriptures and preaching with Hal here and there around the countryside. The husbands of Belle’s older sisters were his new friends, amiable smiling young men called Joshua and Albert. One of them was a drainlayer and the other worked in a menswear shop, and when they weren’t at their jobs they helped to find more seeds for the Church of Twenty. Already the sisters and their husbands had seven children between them.

  Wallace had enough money saved in the bank for a deposit on a house when he gave up regular work, but there were weeks when the ministry didn’t offer much by way of a living. Hal said Belle could take a job for a while, as long as it was something humble. She first took a job at a boarding house near the end of the main street, cleaning bedrooms after the guests left. In the evening she came home smelling of carbolic soap and toilets. When she heard about a job washing dishes at the Violet Café on the waterfront, she asked her father if she might try out for that. It was a den of harlots, her father said; he’d heard about the kind of women who hung out around that place. Then there was trouble in the boarding house. A man ran amok with an axe and Belle nearly got her head sliced in two. Hal and Wallace went to see the woman who ran the café. The woman was all lip and very impudent in Hal’s opinion, although Wallace rather liked her. I make the rules, she told them, and Belle will obey what I say when she comes to work at the Violet Café; she could worry about their rules when she went home. They waited for her to show them around but she didn’t, just waiting for their answer with a take it or leave it look in her eye. In the end, Hal said Belle could go there and work for a few months, until she was married, now that they had set a date for the wedding. Belle was sixteen by then. Her older sisters were thinking about their matrons’ outfits already.