Songs from the Violet Cafe Read online

  ‘I reckon she’s about as ready for things as she’ll get,’ Hal said, as they drove home from the café. He looked at Wallace speculatively.

  That night he did take her at last. When they first lay down together he thought she would be afraid but she put both her arms around his neck and pressed her cheek against his, as if being in bed was the most natural thing in the world. He plunged into her with the urgency of a man who has come to his last gasp, yet with a tenderness that surprised even him. Only it didn’t feel like breaking and entering, and afterwards he sensed that she might have been disappointed. He told himself this was only natural, he supposed the reality was not what most girls expected. All the same, this is what they did every night from then on. She would rest her head on his shoulder while they slept, her hand sometimes stroking him as if to give him comfort. Nobody seemed to mind, although he couldn’t be sure what her mother thought, as she never said. Sometimes he sensed her, when he was drifting off to sleep, walking up and down the house.

  It surprised him how much Belle liked her job in the café. One of the girls was getting married soon, just like her. Hester said she could help Belle with the dresses for her wedding; she was terrific at sewing. They were ever so busy at the café. Everyone, except one girl called Marianne, was pretty nice to her, although the boss kept them all on their toes, and you had to be quick with the pots and pans or the cooks shouted at you. But that was all part of the job and you had to understand the pressure everyone was under to get their jobs done in time and keep the customers happy. He wondered about the place then. His image of a kitchen was a plain serviceable room with a sink and dirty plates, much like the one where Belle worked alongside her silent mother. What could be different about it? Sometimes when Belle came home late at night and he was lying in bed waiting for her, he heard her kick off her shoes and hum to herself, or even sing little snatches of song. It unsettled him, knowing that Belle was moving out there in the world beyond. He remembered the wicked girl who had tried to lead him astray. Or had she been wicked? She had led him to God and then disappeared like a phantom. Perhaps she had been some kind of angel. At any rate, he had been led there to Belle and her people and her people’s people. Belle was his star, his private beacon, his dazzling little mistress. Untouched by the world.

  ‘You should give up work now,’ he said one morning, after her third late night in a row.

  She was washing dishes, running them under the hot tap to rinse them, polishing them on the tea towel with painstaking care, as if washing dishes was the most important thing a girl could be doing.

  ‘I like it there,’ she said.

  ‘You’ll have to stop soon.’

  ‘Why? It’s money in the bank.’

  He knew she was proud of the growing line of figures in her Post Office book. ‘You’ll have the wedding to see to. And we might have a baby next year.’ This had just occurred to him, but he was enchanted at once with the idea, seeing it immediately as the thing they needed to do very soon.

  ‘We’re not even married yet,’ she said, scoffing at him.

  Her overbright stare embarrassed him, her eyes were so big and blue. ‘We could have. I mean, we could have any time.’ Now that he had started on this train of thought, he could see that it was one thing to have sex with Belle; it was another for the young pastor and his bride to be with child (how he loved that biblical phrase) on their wedding day.

  ‘I’ve got a diaphragm,’ she said, ‘didn’t you know?’

  ‘You didn’t tell me,’ he said, stunned. He didn’t think unmarried women could get contraception.

  ‘Well, somebody had to do something, didn’t they? I mean, you didn’t think about it, did you?’

  Wallace smacked Belle then, first under her eye and then across the mouth, and when he had done that, he took off his belt and hit her on the buttocks three times, each time harder than the last. He loved it, the power of it. She didn’t make a sound. Afterwards he put his arms around her and said that he was sorry.

  ‘I’ll put you to bed and make you a cup of Ovaltine,’ he said.

  She pulled out of his grasp. ‘I’ve got to go to work,’ she said. ‘Now.’

  He heard her running water in the bathroom and soon after that she left the house.

  It had begun like that, back then.

  RUTH AND HESTER

  The bookshop was long and narrow and full of wood panelling, like a miniature version of those famous Fifth Avenue bookshops that Ruth Hagley had visited when she was young, although they had come to seem like a mirage. She loved the books sitting in orderly rows on the shelves. There were days when she almost wished nobody would come into the shop and interfere with the straight organised way she pulled their spines forward to the edge of their shelves, their colourful covers which she could interpret without reading the book, the lovely spicy newness of their smell when they were laid open. Ruth banned children from the shop, even though parents complained from time to time. One had even written to the local newspaper, claiming she was inhibiting the educational growth of the youngsters in the community. It is my shop, Ruth said with implacable steel, to a reporter intrigued by this brisk ample woman with a narrow sideways glance, wearing a black cardigan, one of those long ones with deep pockets, and a checked skirt that reached her ankles. A stifler of knowledge, the letter writer said, someone who doesn’t enjoy and understand the company of the young. What sort of a person is that to be running a bookshop? But Ruth Hagley told the reporter, ‘Children may go to the library. That is what a library is for, a place where people may use jam rolls for bookmarks if they wish. Bookshops are for the preservation of newness and originality until someone pays for the privilege of owning a book. Then they can do what they like with it.’ The newspaper ran a short puzzled piece over a headline that said ‘LOCAL LIBRARY BOOKS FILLED WITH JAM’. It wasn’t great for business. A new bookshop was opened on the next corner, by a man with hair like an oiled raven’s wing who was in love with another man, and in touch with people’s feelings. His business was doing very well.

  Ruth found herself capitulating to the demands of commerce. A publisher’s representative (a rep, as he vulgarly called himself) came round and persuaded her to invite an exciting young author who was onto his third or fourth highly successful novel to come into the shop for a signing session. Ruth had never held such an event before, but if she sometimes offended people, she considered herself astute, and times were difficult.

  ‘Are you suggesting a little gathering?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh that would be simply divine,’ said the young man. Ruth thought people only talked like that in West End stage plays.

  ‘What do you think I should serve?’

  ‘Gary’s partial to a beer or two.’ Gary wrote about the life of men in the bush, hunting and fishing, that kind of thing, of which Ruth knew absolutely nothing.

  ‘There won’t be any beer in here. Think what it would do to the books.’

  ‘Well, perhaps a little glass of bubbly, something nice and sparkly. Up near the counter away from the books.’

  ‘It would be after six o’clock. I’d be arrested.’

  ‘Mrs Hagley, it’s not as if you’re a hotel.’

  ‘I should think not. It’s a public place though. Anybody can come in here.’ Her expression registered how unfortunate this was. ‘A cup of tea or a glass of lemonade, perhaps.’

  ‘Well, I suppose so.’

  ‘It’ll be expensive enough as it is. Are you going to pay for these refreshments?’

  ‘My firm could make a contribution,’ he said uneasily. ‘We’ll help with the advertisement for the paper.’

  ‘Advertisement? Definitely not. I’m not putting an advertisement in that paper, and besides, if it’s to be a party I don’t want just anyone turning up.’

  ‘You don’t advertise at all?’

  ‘Only on radio. Now and then.’ Ruth loved the radio.

  ‘Then how does anyone know what you’ve got in stock?’
/>   ‘They know I’m here.’ Her voice was regal.

  ‘Well, I don’t know whether that would work.’ The rep turned towards the door as if he might go away. She guessed he would walk on up the street to the sleek sad man in the corner bookshop, whose lover had recently betrayed him.

  ‘A flier to all my regulars. I have five hundred people on my mailing list.’

  The rep turned back, his eyes lit up with surprised admiration. ‘Now you’re talking.’

  ‘You’ll pay for the postage?’ she said, her voice as smooth as ball bearings. When he nodded, she said, ‘My daughter will attend to the food.’

  ‘I think we should make provision for one hundred and fifty,’ Ruth told her daughter that evening.

  Hester looked up from her task, sewing seed pearls down the front panel of her wedding dress, and flushed. Her mother was used to Hester’s flushes, the dark maroon stain that started at her throat and travelled upwards. This was almost the only sign her daughter ever gave that she was annoyed. Sometimes Ruth wanted to shake her and tell her to shout back at her. She knew very well that what she was asking was an imposition. Hester had so little time off from the café where she worked, because the woman who ran it was well known for being difficult and imperious and expected her staff to work longer hours than anyone in town. Violet Trench was the nearest Ruth had ever come to meeting her match, and when it came to Hester she had a way of winning that Ruth could never fully comprehend. Hester was twenty-eight and her only child. They had gone through so much together. There was Hester’s birth when Ruth was forty-six years old and the thought of a child was so unlikely in brief late marriage that the idea simply never occurred to her until one day her clothes wouldn’t fit and then a few days later she was bleeding almost to death in hospital and Hester was breathing her first heart-wrenching gasps, her face as blue as anemones, and there Ruth was, a mother. As if that were not enough, widowhood and poverty followed in short order, and then, when it seemed she had nowhere to turn, in one of those sudden reversals of fortune that seemed to follow Ruth, an inheritance came from abroad.

  Ruth considered her young life as dense, packed, virginal. I’ve had an interesting life, she was wont to say. She would describe it as genteel and a little impoverished with some treats thrown in (her father was a professional soldier; he moved his family often). When she immigrated to New Zealand with Monty, a retired civil servant who had wanted to see the world before he died, as he put it, and had fallen in love with Auckland on a blue summer’s day and wouldn’t leave, she decided that she would take things as they came. But then there was Hester and everything changed so quickly. She moved south and bought her shop from the money that had fallen like a merciful rain from afar. Hester grew up surrounded by the smell of new ink on the page, counting stationery packs after school. A girl of quality, her mother believed. She expected her to go far. Hester would win scholarships and go to university, she too would stay clear-skinned and virginal. Instead, Hester grew more quiet and shy as one year followed another. When she was fifteen her frothy brown hair became mysteriously streaked with grey, as if she was already old.

  Cooking and sewing were all that interested her. Rather than study classics she propped recipe books above the sink and cooked. Le Guide Culinaire by that Frenchman, Escoffier, was thumbed and stained beyond recognition. It made Ruth shudder to see the disgusting thing, but when she arrived home from the shop, dinner was always waiting. ‘You shouldn’t have done this, dear,’ Ruth said each evening, but the fact was her own dinners were always late, the potatoes not properly cooked. It was a comfort to sit down to Hester’s inventions. The aromatic scent of spices and herbs that Hester wrote away for reminded Ruth of school trips across the Channel, the week in Provence, the little cafés in the south of France. While other girls were still chasing hockey balls, Hester took up ballroom dancing and met a boy called Owen. They had been engaged for five years. An impossible match, her mother declared. A farm labourer who came from common stock. Don’t go ahead with this, Ruth warned her daughter. I’ll cut you off without a penny. By this time, Hester worked in the shop because Ruth could see that the girl had no ambition at all. Hester sewed ballroom dresses by the dozen. They accumulated like giant glittering puffballs in her bedroom. When there were too many she sold off the last year’s lot and made a small profit. This was her dowry, she said, so her mother needn’t bother herself about the money, she and Owen would manage. You’ll get over it, Ruth cautioned, you mark my words.

  ‘Would Violet mind if you stayed home and ran up a few sandwiches?’ she asked her daughter the night of the book rep’s visit. Because Hester no longer worked for her mother. Ruth still didn’t know how she had met Violet Trench. It seemed as if some act of seduction had taken place. One day Hester was pricing paperbacks and the next day she was working as a cook at the Violet Café at the edge of town. As far as Ruth could make out, Hester had begun talking to Violet about her passion for cooking and recipe books in the shop one afternoon, and Violet had followed up with a dinner invitation to her flat. Only it was Hester who had cooked for Violet, and Ruth who had had to do with cold pressed tongue and salad. To make matters worse, Hester was now going through with this disastrous marriage. Ruth blamed Violet Trench for that. It was as if an alien had landed in Hester’s brain. She had been to see Violet to enlist her help in preventing it.

  ‘She could do worse,’ Violet said. ‘She could kill herself. If you don’t mind, I’ve got work to do.’

  ‘Mother, you know how busy we are,’ Hester said now. ‘Mrs Trench needs me.’

  ‘She owes me some consideration. Taking my staff away, the way she did.’

  ‘Don’t start that again. Please.’

  ‘I expect I can manage on my own.’

  ‘You could get someone in to help you. You could afford it.’

  ‘I’m not sure that I could.’ Ruth allowed her voice a quaver, but there was just enough of the real thing there to make Hester pause. ‘Well, it’s the new bookshop,’ Ruth said, looking at her hands, well-kept hands but thickened these days and mottled with liver spots. Her single worn ring was embedded in a swollen finger.

  ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ Hester said, sighing. ‘I might be able to run up some sandwiches in my break.’

  ‘Some nice little savouries?’ Ruth picked delicately at the encrusted satin Hester was sewing. ‘So pretty, dear.’

  ‘I’ll make them the night before.’

  ‘You couldn’t possibly help me to serve them?’

  ‘No, I couldn’t. Oh damn you, what time is this bun fight of yours?’

  ‘Hester. Language.’ Her daughter had developed a habit of smart talk since she began working at the café. ‘Five till six. Really, that woman rules your life, you don’t have customers until six thirty.’ Her eyes filled with real involuntary tears which made her ashamed. Age was not a pretty sight for the young. She lifted her chin.

  ‘I’ll go in and do my prep early,’ her daughter said, her scissors moving smartly over loose threads.

  ‘I think it will be quite charming,’ Ruth told the radio shopping reporter, Freda Messenger, the following morning. Freda was a nervous rushing sort of woman, who darted from one shop to another gathering material for her programmes, which she delivered during the afternoon in an austere polite voice. Her hair was a neutral blonde, occasionally tinged an odd shade of green when her regular dye needed freshening; her long upper lip wore a heavy down if allowed to go unchecked, although she had taken lately to electrolysis once a month. On this spring morning with its cool wind, she wore a pale mustard jacket over a silk blouse and scarf, a tweed skirt and sensible brown brogues, as might be expected of someone who pounded the streets all morning. An astute woman, Ruth considered, the nearest she had to a friend these days. If they had been more of an age, they could have been close, she sometimes reflected. Freda was like her, a woman of quality who had fallen on hard times, married in haste but, unlike Ruth, had had time to repent at leisure. They w
ere both the mothers of only children, both girls. The resemblance ended there. Freda’s daughter, Evelyn, looked as if she might have the success Ruth had dreamed of for Hester; next year she would go away to university.

  Her husband was younger than Freda by some years, a sparkling devilish man about town who made quantities of money and spent it all on horses and, Ruth suspected, women as well. A man who hung around bars when he should have been at home with his family, or who fooled about at the Violet Café. Ruth asked Hester what he got up to down there, but Hester closed up on her. What people did at the Violet Café was their own business. Ruth considered asking Freda about the café, as if with a passing professional interest, for often on the radio, which she kept switched on in the shop to the local station, she heard Freda talking in an animated way about the café, its charming ambience, the quality of its unusual menu, and the warm welcome patrons (oh what had happened to customers, Ruth wondered) would receive from its increasingly famous owner, Violet Trench. In the end, she always ended up deciding against it. She knew from Hester that Evelyn had a job at the café, filling in until she started at university.

  ‘I don’t like to mention this,’ Freda said, ‘but the new shop is putting up a special display of guns and deer heads in the window.’