Songs from the Violet Cafe Read online

  Ruth shuddered. ‘Good luck to him, I say. The customers will get a nice bite to eat when they come here.’

  ‘They’re something of a novelty, these book signing sessions,’ Freda observed.

  ‘Oh, people have book parties in the cities all the time, these days,’ said Ruth airily, ‘One has to move with the times.’ Privately, she thought how tired Freda was looking.

  FREDA AND EVELYN, AND, IN HIS ABSENCE, LOU

  Freda Messenger sat in front of the microphone, her finger poised on the button, waiting for her voice level to be taken. The studio was like a small cell. No natural light intruded. Between her and the technician stood a soundproof pane of glass. In these moments before the broadcast began, she was aware that intangible airwaves were her only connection with the world beyond, and this was when things always seemed as though they might slip out of her grasp. It was not that she didn’t enjoy her work as a shopping reporter. If she was asked she would say what a great privilege it was to be part of the working lives of so many people in the town, and that in return she made a valuable contribution to their businesses. But she always felt fearful just before she started, as if some secret act, more private than love or sex, was about to be performed in public. Some would call it stage fright. In preparation, she repeated a ritual that worked for her week in and week out, breathing deeply through her nose, expelling air with a slight aaaahhh, in and out, until her terror abated.

  Only today she couldn’t breathe at all. Her in breaths emerged as choking gasps. Her nose was blocked and her eyes so swollen she had kept her dark glasses on. Any moment now, she would have to take them off because under the fluorescent light tube it was impossible to read her script.

  A red light on the panel alerted her.

  ‘Try a level now,’ said David Finke, the technician. He was a spiky-haired youth with a white face and red-rimmed eyes. He boarded in town and slept between shifts. That was all he did, he told her. Never went out, just slept. What else was there to do in this hellhole of a town, this pit of a place, reeking of hydrogen sulphide? Where would he go? If he went out he was just as likely to fall down a vent hole and be boiled in a pot like puha, or get eaten by the Maori who lived at the waterfront. He’d done science and a little music at school, before he came here, but neither of them well enough to take up a career. On his way home to his boarding house his only distraction was to check, with a long, thin laboratory thermometer, the temperature levels of the hot pools that dotted the park. Sooner or later he would get away from this place, go back to Hamilton where he grew up. This whole town was just waiting to explode. This apocalyptic view was the main topic of conversation he ever engaged in with Freda.

  She steadied herself, took a grip on the edge of the table. ‘Testing, one, two, three,’ she said and was surprised that her voice sounded normal in her ears.

  ‘Stand by,’ said David.

  ‘Good afternoon, shoppers,’ she began. ‘In today’s programme we bring you an exciting range of what’s new around town. We’ve got brand-new summer knits in vibrant colours in the fashion stores, a uniquely blended line of carpet at the flooring shop and, as a special guest today, we’ve got the town’s newest bookseller, Patrick Trimble, a man who’ll tell you all about the author in town, Gary Lord, that Tarzan of the literary world, and much much more.’

  So far, so good. Now it was time for David to play a track. Freda found herself crying all the way through Pat Boone singing ‘Love Letters in the Sand’. She must pull herself together. David pushed the studio door open, which was against the station rules, once the programme had started.

  ‘What is it?’ he said. ‘Is there something wrong?’

  As if the poor fool was blind. ‘I’m perfectly fine. Get back in that control room now or I’ll have you dismissed. D’you hear me?’

  It was a little station, so she didn’t have a producer. All she was supposed to do was read the script, sound chirpy, and ask a few questions of enthusiastic retailers. She knew she had overstepped the mark.

  The red light flicked on again. ‘Stand by,’ David said, his voice croaking with anxiety. Deep breaths. Now she had to talk for a few minutes about the surge of retail activity in the town. This was unbearable, the ugly face of her problem. When she had gone home at lunchtime to pick up her mail, there was the bank statement, the joint account she shared with her husband. Louis (Lou to others) had spent all their money again.

  ‘What is it this time?’ asked Evelyn, as she sat in her dressing gown rubbing cream on her face. There was something cold about the girl, the way she closed her dark eyebrows together when she frowned, and yet Freda loved her so much that it hurt.

  Freda had placed her hand over the statement. ‘Nothing for you to worry about.’

  ‘It can’t always be my father’s fault,’ Evelyn said.

  But it was Lou’s fault. A little cash here, a bit there, nothing you could point to and say what an extravagance, until you put it all together. Not even some special thing he could exult over. Freda had known money when she was young; it hurt not to have any now. More than that, it was painful to consider how he had spent the money and who had helped him part with it. That was at the heart of the matter.

  Now there was time for a short news update, the weather forecast and a pre-recorded commercial. Ten minutes for Freda to weep uninterrupted. David’s voice from the control room cut through her sobs, the awful heaving she couldn’t seem to stop unless the red light was on.

  ‘Your guest’s here.’

  For a moment she had forgotten what her interview was about. She looked at her notes. No, those were from her conversation last week with Ruth Hagley. Don’t forget the sandwiches. Cucumber and thin ham, nice brown bread. Never mind the book, in this case it’s an irrelevance. Ruth thought of herself as old but shrewd. Perhaps she was. The new bookseller came in, his hands clasped in front of his light grey suit. This was Patrick Trimble who, in the beginning, everyone said didn’t have a show of getting his shop off the ground in opposition to Ruth. But, of course, he was proving them wrong.

  When he sat down opposite Freda, the microphone poised between them, he folded her trembling hands in both of his own. ‘My dear Mrs Messenger,’ he said. ‘What ever can the matter be? Let me get you a glass of water. No? Well, here, you must have this.’ He took out a white folded handkerchief from his pocket and gave it to her.

  ‘Forgive me,’ she said, wiping her eyes. ‘So unprofessional. There, it’s nothing.’

  ‘Grief is never over nothing,’ he said.

  ‘I know, but this isn’t the place for it.’

  ‘Surely it doesn’t choose a time and place. Grief, I mean. Well, if it did,’ he said, stumbling a little, and she could see what a shy and awkward man he really was, but that he had pleasant sad brown eyes, ‘if it did, why then we would choose to be in some other place, some other life. But it’s never like that.’

  The light was on again. ‘Stand by,’ said David, in a low excited squeak, as if he were expecting his anticipated explosion to take place now, at this very moment. A relief from boredom. Freda could see how he hated his job, that he saw himself as a failure. A lot of things were suddenly clear to her, but most of all, that she would live through the next hour, she would advertise and enthuse and sell for her customers, just the way she always did, starting here with Patrick Trimble. ‘Perhaps you would like to begin by telling me about this astonishing book that’s taken the country by storm. You’ve read the book of course?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said, picking up his cue like a professional. In a minute he was talking in a light entertaining way and she knew, with a pang of pity for the woman on the south corner of the street, that his shop was going to do very well, and that she was pleased for him. She put on her dark glasses and leaned forward, nodding her head and letting him do the talking.

  When the interview was over, he said, ‘Let me take you to dinner. There’s a group of us going down to the café at the lakefront this evening after Gary
’s been into the shop. Some good friends of mine are determined to cheer me up, because I’ve been down in the dumps too. Perhaps your husband would like to join us.’

  She would like that, she told him, because she hardly ever went out in the evenings and was often on her own. No, she thought her husband might be ‘doing business’ this evening, but she would get a chance to see her daughter, Evelyn, because she was working at the Violet Café. Just a fill-in job, but the wages were quite good. She would be going on to better things soon.

  ‘I understand,’ Patrick said. ‘I’d heard your daughter was a clever girl.’ The young people leaving town for their education made him pine for his own university days, he explained, warming to his theme. That had been a long time ago.

  ‘Everything was a long time ago,’ Freda said, miserable again. ‘Everything that mattered.’

  THE BOOK PARTY

  Jessie walked through the town with little curiosity at first, for she didn’t intend to stay long. A red brick bank occupied one street corner. A young man wearing a suit emerged, his face merry, an attaché case in one hand, a football in the other, almost dancing as he descended the stairs. As soon as he hit the street, he drop-kicked the ball a short way and ran to catch it. A woman across the road waved to him and he hesitated and waved back. He looked up and down the street as if reminded of something or someone, almost as if he was being followed, then resumed his journey down the street in a quieter fashion, his expression thoughtful. Opposite the bank stood a milk bar. Girls in tight skirts and spiked heels leaned against dark-skinned youths in leather jackets. A youngish man in a suit, with a Bible in one hand, was offering them pamphlets. One of the swarthy boys took one and made a lazy paper dart that flickered momentarily above his head and fell at the feet of the preacher, who appeared not to notice this desecration of the Word.

  Suddenly a commotion erupted as the town began to close down in the late afternoon. The noise Jessie heard issued forth from one of the town’s bookshops. It looked as if a scrum had developed, the sort Jessie associated with the department store on sale day, people shoving and elbowing each other aside as if anxious they might miss the very last item. A huge banner hung from the bookshop roof, right down over the street. GARY LORD COMES TO TOWN — ALL WELCOME the sign read in three-foot letters. Gary, shouted voices. Over here, over here. A man with tousled hair and a roll-your-own cigarette hanging from his lip sat at a table in the centre of the melée, a young woman with large eyes clutching his arm or handfuls of air when he moved away. The man was signing books with such speed that once the signature had been received the recipient was ejected from the shop by the force of the crowd pushing forward to replace them in the queue. On the footpath, these people were forming a small throng, wondering what to do next. Then someone turned and began walking further along the street to what turned out to be the next bookshop. The others began to follow. Jessie could see from the street that the second shop was more or less deserted, except for a tall older woman, and another one of indeterminate age with pink cheeks and a flustered expression, who was fussing over food laid out on the counter. A short row of the famous author’s books were lined up across a centre shelf in the window, between textbooks on the bottom shelf and some romantic novels with bright swooning covers on the top.

  The book buyers from along the street bore down on the shop, clutching their parcels and talking at the top of their voices. Jessie followed them inside as they swept through the doors, hardly seeming to notice the proprietor or her assistant, and began attacking the sandwiches.

  ‘What can I get you?’ the older woman asked, in an unfriendly voice.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Jessie.

  ‘I don’t sell nothing,’ the woman said.

  ‘Mother, let it go,’ said the other. ‘I’ll stay and help you clear up when they’ve finished.’

  For hours, Jessie had been aching with hunger. She considered going into the milk bar and ordering a milkshake but decided against it. She wasn’t afraid, she felt different. Her reflection followed her down the long mile of shop fronts. A man closing the doors of what appeared to be a sports goods and fishing tackle shop, turned and half whistled, a low sizzling sound between his teeth. His mouth was strong and curved, and his colouring was not unlike that of the young Maori men outside the milk bar, but a lighter shade of copper. He wasn’t tall, but dapper in that chunky middle-aged way that happens to handsome men. He wore a brown hairy jacket, moleskin pants, a small hat tilted over his eye. She met his glance without meaning to, and saw the beginning of a smile. An older woman might have thought him vulnerable.

  This was the man with whom Jessie fell briefly into conversation, the one who suggested that if she were looking for a bite to eat, she could do no better than the Violet Café, down another block and turn left.

  PART FOUR

  THE VIOLET CAFÉ

  1963–1964

  THE WAITRESS

  The café was situated in a white stucco and wood building on the edge of a lake. The address was Number 8, Lake Road. A green picket fence surrounded a garden of white daisies beneath a magnolia tree, its lemony-scented cups of bloom, speckled with recent rain, so perfectly formed that Jessie found them almost heart-rending. At the end of the path a black door with a brass knocker stood ajar. Jessie pushed it open because the sign outside and the smell of garlic promised food. At once, she found herself in a large L-shaped open space that seemed to be full of reflected light, for a part of the room was flanked by french doors that opened onto a verandah facing the lake. A woman sat behind a low reception desk, her head bent over a large reservations book.

  She was an older woman, dressed in an impeccably tailored navy-blue linen dress that might have looked mannish had it not been for the drawn threadwork across her breast. There were no rings on her fingers but she wore a heavy silver bracelet on her right wrist and a square-faced watch on the left. The woman looked Jessie up and down, a slight contempt lurking in her cool blue gaze.

  ‘I have no vacancies,’ the woman said, before Jessie had a chance to speak. Her astonishing hair, the colour of a pale hydrangea head, was drawn up in a chignon, giving the effect of a halo of flowers or blue smoke. On the dark wooden bench stood a small sign bearing the name ‘Violet Trench’.

  It registered then with Jessie that she had passed another sign outside which read VACANCIES, APPLY WITHIN. She placed a tan leather suitcase on the floor beside her. Stamped with the words ‘Warranted Bullockhide’, it had brass clasps, white saddle stitching around the handle — it was the same one her mother had carried on both her honeymoons. She said; ‘I haven’t come about a job.’

  At the far end of the café, a young man with slanted almond-shaped eyes, and wearing a striped apron tied over his impossibly slim hips, stood in front of an upright piano. He fingered the keys idly, nothing more than a line of scales. His gaze rested on Violet Trench and although he appeared very young, and she was not a young woman, there was a lurking heat about the way he looked at her. Jessie, glancing away from the woman’s insistent eyes, saw that the whole café was white, broken only by stained wooden ceiling beams and the polished lacquered surfaces of a dozen or so tables, and chairs made of black wrought iron. The tables were laid with dark green place mats with raffish fringed edges, and modern stainless-steel cutlery. Alongside Violet Trench’s name on its stand stood a small cut-glass vase containing a clutch of white violets, and straight away, Jessie thought, how clever, how unexpected. White violets, even though the woman herself was blue from head to foot, except for her fine lined skin and a hint of pale lipstick.

  ‘I usually depend on word of mouth,’ said the woman, and shrugged slightly, leaving it there.

  ‘But it’s early in the season,’ said Jessie.

  ‘I may have someone starting tomorrow. I should have taken the sign down earlier.’

  ‘You could do worse than me,’ Jessie said. ‘I’m used to waiting on people.’

  ‘Tables?’

  ‘China depart
ment,’ Jessie told her, naming the Wellington store.

  ‘You can’t eat china.’

  ‘You like it though,’ Jessie said. ‘Nice china.’

  The woman looked her over again, her eyebrows raised. Jessie almost turned away, seeing herself through her eyes. Five foot eleven, thin as a broom, with a flat chest. Her hands had always seemed disproportionately large, compared with her wrists and ankles, her skin pale beneath its mosaic of freckles. Although she wore her long hair pulled back from her face and clasped with combs on either side of her head, curly tendrils, the colour of gingerbread, escaped round her face. She wore a duffel coat over a red jersey and a pleated black and green skirt. Her legs were clad in red stockings, her feet in black buckled sandals.

  ‘I don’t take on complicated girls,’ Violet Trench said. ‘Not if I can help it. Let me look at your fingernails.’

  Jessie laid her hands out on the counter. ‘Clean enough?’

  ‘Soft. This is hard work.’

  Jessie straightened herself. What on earth was she thinking of? ‘I didn’t come about a job. I wanted something to eat. Although I thought this was a coffee bar.’

  ‘We have a continental influence here — we serve meals. Anyway, we’re fully booked.’

  ‘Then who’s taking Belle’s place tonight?’ The young man had abandoned the piano, and approached cat-like, to hover in a shadow just to the side of a slanting band of light.

  For an instant Violet’s composure seemed about to desert her. ‘Oh, what’s wrong with Belle tonight?’ she asked on a long exhaled breath. ‘No, don’t tell me, I don’t think I could stand to hear it again.’

  The sky, which had seemed thin and watery when Jessie was out on the street, was turning purple, a dangerous eerie light. Violet turned to Jessie. ‘Ten shillings for the night. Cash. Don’t tell me you’re not interested — it will give you something to do for the evening, something to write down in your notebook. Oh, it’s all right, I saw you for what you were as soon as you walked in: a poor university student on the lookout. Make some notes, write an essay about it — my night in the provinces, how quaint we all are. What did you say your name was?’