by Fiona Kidman
If he willed himself strongly enough.
Violet Trench’s flat was very small, very white, with wrought iron bars covering the windows. They reminded her of France, and when she looked through them, especially if the tree on the verge outside was moving and making shadow patterns on her wall, she thought of the years she spent there before the war. But that was a long time ago. There had been an inevitability about her coming to live in this place, rather than staying abroad. On the whole, she was happier here than she thought she would be anywhere else. Besides, love had arrived on her doorstep, not exactly uninvited.
On this Christmas Day, the dinner for her staff over, she climbed into bed in the late afternoon, listening to the wind that had risen outside. She lived in an ordered chaos — clothes stored close together, recipe books stacked high beside the bed with its soft fat pink eiderdown and silky feminine sheets, flowers in not one, but several vases, a tangle of pretty beads hanging from the back of a chair. There were few dishes to be found in the apartment, because Violet rarely ate here, except for an early morning snack, but there were bone china cups in the tiny galley kitchen, and glasses for wine. The phone book was under a pile of her freshly laundered lingerie but she didn’t need to consult it for the number she gave the operator.
‘I’m so sorry to bother the doctor, Pauline,’ she said, when the phone was answered, ‘but I’m so unwell, I wonder if Felix could visit me. I’m not far from the centre of town, well, you know where I am. No, no, I’m sure I’ll be all right here on my own. I don’t feel on my own, even though it’s Christmas, because I’ve spent time with friends this afternoon. No, you didn’t need to think of asking me round, you’ve got your own family to think about at Christmas. I don’t know what’s come over me — the most awful sick headache, sort of like a migraine, although I’m not given to them as a rule.’
Of course, Felix had been there before, he was by now a regular visitor. Her call had caught him off his guard, but he forgave her when he arrived because being with Violet was like being in a perfumed tent harbouring only delight, her blue hair floating around her shoulders in a hyacinth swathe. Even if he could stay for only half an hour.
LOVE, LOVE
Frottage. A word like French cheese. Jessie would come across it when she was older. Her erotic life would be represented for years by the desire for her body to be pressed against that of another who was clothed. She would laugh when she read that it is an abnormality, to desire people in this way, but it is what she and John did, pressing themselves against each other through their clothes. A dry root. How a woman drives a man crazy and keeps her virginity. Or a woman is driven crazy. It was what people did then, to keep themselves chaste, and you could see it any Saturday night at one of the local ballrooms, the young men and women with their bodies glued to each other as they danced. After the last waltz was over, would they, wouldn’t they, go one step further and touch naked flesh? Not that the girls from the Violet Café went to many dances, except for Hester who had some Saturday nights off to go dancing with Owen, the way she did when she first knew him. That was the thing about waitresses and dish-washers and cooks — their lives were the reverse of everyone else’s. They slept late in the mornings and got up puffy-eyed at lunchtime, and their working day was just coming to life when other people were retiring for the evening, or going out to party and dance if they were young and free. It was what set them apart from others in town.
Instead of dances or visits to the movies, they went for walks or drives in the afternoon, or occasionally for trips on Lou Messenger’s boat. These outings were organised by Evelyn, whose father seemed to be making special efforts to be nice to her. Nobody really wanted to go any more, except for Evelyn herself and Marianne. But at least these two seemed, for the moment, to be friends. Sitting between Marianne and David, each cocooned in their private selves, Evelyn looked more content, less inclined towards sharpness. All the same, Jessie felt out of it, even when John was there. There was no more skinny-dipping in hot pools.
‘I don’t want to go,’ Jessie said one afternoon, when they were about to cast off.
‘Why not?’ John wanted to know.
‘I just don’t want to go. Sorry.’
As she climbed back onto land, John said, ‘I’ll come with you.’
The boat pulled away, trailing a wake through the slight algal bloom that had infected the water since summer began. ‘Are you angry with someone?’ John asked.
It was on the tip of her tongue to say you, of course, acting one minute as if you fancy me and the next as if I didn’t exist.
‘Stop,’ John said. ‘Calm down. I don’t know what’s got into you.’ She was walking so fast he had to stride to keep up with her.
‘Stop following me,’ she said.
He looked as if he were about to do exactly that, then he changed his mind. They had arrived back at the café.
‘Can you ride a bike?’ he asked.
‘Of course.’
‘Well some girls can’t. I’ve got mine out the back and there’s a spare one that my brother left. He’s been supposed to pick it up for ages. If you can ride a boy’s bike, we could go off somewhere.’
This was how they came to ride together to the old place, where John had lived with Hugo and Ming and his brothers. Because it was the weekend, there was nobody about, although someone had been there earlier in the day and watered the market gardens that lay all around them. Jessie’s first impression was rows of ripening tomatoes, staked in long ripples as they reddened under the sun.
The house was bleached of paint, but neatly kept, as if it had just been left for the day. John unlatched the door, ushering her into a dim room, with a bench running down one side of it, woks and cooking utensils suspended from hooks on the wall. Beyond this room, she saw, as her eyes became unaccustomed to the low light, a bedroom, lined with bunks.
‘Crazy,’ John said, as Jessie took in her surroundings, ‘they could have had whatever they wanted in the end. My mother would never change anything, and then my father became as stubborn as she was. They put their money into my brothers’ businesses. I might open a restaurant of my own, when I’ve finished my apprenticeship with Mrs Trench.’
He had begun making her a cup of tea, first sniffing the leaves for freshness. ‘My brothers have their lunch here when they’re working in the gardens, I don’t think there’s any milk.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’ She was sitting at the table, watching him, itching to look at the records in yellowed sleeves beside a wind-up gramophone. But she sensed that she was meant only to look, not investigate.
‘Why wouldn’t you go on the lake today?’ he asked, handing her her tea. It looked more like dark scented water.
‘I don’t know,’ Jessie said. ‘I’m just fed up.’
‘With Marianne?’
‘With everyone, I guess. I have to think about going home. Back to Wellington.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘I should go and see my mother.’
‘I thought you were mad with her.’
‘Not really. My mother isn’t the kind of person you get mad with. She’s just inefficient.’
‘Inefficient. You’re a laugh. What can you do about that?’
‘That’s not what I mean. I can’t explain.’ Irene’s odd irrelevance was impossible to describe, the way she could never see what was coming round the next corner, the hectic choices she’d made. All the books she had read.
‘Tell me about the truffles,’ she said, wanting to lead him away from the topic of her mother because she didn’t really want to think about her. ‘Why are they such a big deal?’
‘They’re called the black magic apple of love.’
‘Is this where they grow?’
‘Don’t be silly,’ he said, as if she was trespassing. ‘They only grow in France.’
‘But you said they grew round here, that first night I came to the café.’
‘You imagined it. Anyway, women aren’t a
llowed on the truffle beds.’
‘Why not?’
‘They’re impure.’
‘Women? What rubbish,’ she said, and laughed, breaking the tension that was still simmering between them.
‘I’ll tell you a story, okay?’
‘Okay.’
‘There was an old woman who was tired and hungry and lost in the bush,’ he began. ‘She came to the house of an old man who was poor. Still, he asked her to come in and share his meal. All he had was some shrivelled potatoes, cooked on the hearth. As the old woman began to peel the skins off the potatoes, she turned into a fairy. “Don’t be alarmed,” she said. “I’m the fairy of the woods, and you’re a kind man, and I’m going to give you a gift. These poor potatoes you’ve so humbly shared with me will bring the end to all your troubles.” And in front of him, the potatoes turned into truffles, full of the scent that drives people crazy. Overpowering, mysterious truffles. So the old man got rich, but he kept on being kind and generous, and everyone still liked him. Which is unusual when people who have been poor suddenly become rich, like someone who’s won the lottery. His children weren’t such good people. They grew up lazy and selfish. Years later, the good fairy came back in disguise, dressed again like the old woman. The children refused to give her food and hospitality. So the fairy buried the truffles underground, round the roots of oak trees, and turned the selfish children into pigs to root them out.’
‘A fairy story. Is that all there is?’
‘Don’t you like it?’
‘Yes, of course I do,’ she said, amused. ‘Who told you that?’
‘I made it up.’
‘Was it Hugo?’
John had begun clearing up. ‘He was just a father.’
Yes, she might have said, and I was the last person to kiss him, but she didn’t.
The following weekend, Jessie thought they might go to the house again, but John said perhaps it would rain later in the day, and suggested, instead, a short walk near the lake. It had been decided, without actually being discussed, that they wouldn’t go out with Lou and the others. Neither of them had told the rest about their trip to the house.
Together, John and Jessie wandered along the shoreline, arriving at a straggling bush area that stretched down the cobalt yellow rocks and the pale turquoise shallows of a sulphurous bay. A notice board close to the lake edge described the way the acidic water could dissolve the webbing between the feet of ducks. John sat close to her, and let his hand fall awkwardly on her thigh. When she didn’t push him away, he pressed down on her crotch. She felt a flare in the centre of her thighs, and turned towards him. She was wearing a yellow and navy striped cotton dress, for which Hester had chosen the fabric, because she thought the colours suited her. Jessie had wondered if she might look like a bumble bee, but she liked the soft satiny finish of the material. John rubbed the fabric in a circular fashion. She closed her eyes, waiting for him to lift her skirt and find the place between her legs. It’s all right, she told him, but he didn’t seem to hear her, as his tongue licked the inside of her ear. His hand moved to the bodice of her dress, travelling over the saucer shapes of her breasts. He hoisted himself into the valley between her legs, pressing himself to the cotton skirt, so that she could feel the softly curved outline of his penis, not what she expected. All the same, her own licking fire hadn’t subsided, so that she heard herself calling out his name in a strange high-pitched voice.
He rolled off her, his face pleased and dreamy.
She wondered why this hadn’t happened the weekend before, at the house, and supposed it must have been out of respect for the memory of his parents. And she wondered whether anything more would come of it.
Violet was holding forth again about the chemical properties of food and how it was cooked.
‘Air is almost as important as heat, when you cook,’ she told Jessie.
‘Hot air?’ Jessie asked.
Violet raised her eyebrows. ‘Well, it depends,’ she said. ‘Food’s full of all kinds of volatile properties that air can spoil. Or in some cases, air is just what you need. That’s the secret, knowing when you need air and when you don’t. If you boil water for a long time before you make tea, you drive out the air and make tea like dishwater.’
‘Or vegetables?’ Cabbage cabbage never mind the da-mage. The smell of it haunting every cranny of the house. ‘Why are you telling me all this?’
‘Oh well, Jessie, food’s a journey you can’t avoid. You might as well do it as best you can.’
Violet was measuring her up and down. The way she did. ‘Hester will be leaving soon. I’d like you to take her place.’
‘Do the cooking?’
‘Hester and John can teach you.’
‘I need to think about it,’ Jessie said. But she could feel in her bones that she would say yes. She saw the way she and John would stand alongside each other of an evening, and how that could go on for a long time. The future stretched away before her in an infinity of bubbling pots. How to cook a steak and how to flamber. The knowledge that a sauce was ready when it reached the consistency of cream. The value of heat and air. How to read shadows. These were things Jessie had already learnt from Violet. When she looks back she will think that Violet knew she was planning to leave, that she placed temptation in her way.
As if to confirm that Jessie would not leave, Susan pulled out from being bridesmaid at Hester’s wedding, and Hester asked Jessie if she would stand in for her. Hester’s face was very red, hot with anger. ‘I feel really stupid,’ she said.
‘I’m sure she would have come if she could.’
‘No, she wouldn’t. She didn’t even have an excuse. Just sorry I can’t make it. It’s not even as if she had to pay for her dress. She never meant to be my bridesmaid.’
‘Well, I’m really honoured that you should ask me,’ Jessie said, wanting to make it all right. She could see it was now blindingly obvious to Hester that Susan was not the friend she had believed her to be, and that asking her seemed like an embarrassing afterthought, especially as she and Jessie hadn’t known each other very long. And perhaps Hester didn’t know very many other young women, no one else she could call her best friend. But then, Jessie decided, there were other girls at the café who could have been chosen ahead of her, and she did like Hester. And she couldn’t think of anyone else who would ever be likely to ask her to be a bridesmaid. She would be too tall, or too plain, too angular altogether for frills and flounces. Although, as it turned out, it was nothing frilly that Hester wanted her to wear, but rather an elegant emerald-green satin gown that fell in a straight soft line to her ankles. When she caught her reflection in the glass, during the final fitting, she couldn’t believe she was the girl in the mirror. Her hair was caught up in a knot; she had to lean down for Hester to place a circlet of green leaves and white flowers on her head.
Hester surveyed her, as if Jessie were her own personal creation. And so she was. No matter that Marianne had stopped speaking to her since news of her bridesmaid’s duties had leaked out at the café, or that she must meet Harry and learn to walk down the aisle on his arm, for the bridal march, none of this mattered.
Or, that she had had another letter from her mother, written in a faltering hand:
Dear Jessie,
I’ll certainly look forward to seeing some photographs of you in your outfit. I can’t imagine you being a bridesmaid. I never had a white wedding, not for either of them — perhaps you remember my marriage to Jock? You were such a wee thing but you were as still as a mouse, as if you knew what a serious moment it was, though afterwards you ran a temperature. Well dear, I’ve got a bit of a temp myself right now. I had a little operation the other day, nothing much, just a bit of a look see the dr said, you’ll remember I mentioned that I was having some tests. Nothing much to worry about, I’m sure, things will settle down. I’m pleased you’ve got nice friends, dear, I had some lovely friends at college but I seemed to lose touch with them. There was one I liked especially who
went off to be a journalist and got sick and died, not that I was her very best friend, though I’d have liked to have been. She had a way with words, the way you do. Not long until university starts now, so I expect you’ll be home before long. Can’t wait to see you.
Much love, Mum x
Jessie didn’t see how she could possibly get away, not even for a little while. Hester was relying on her for every little thing, including the throwing of a shower party that would take place at her house. Jessie discovered how much time it took to ensure that the invited guests didn’t all bring flour sifters or lemon squeezers, and that someone did have tea towels on their list. Besides that, all of a sudden she and John were responsible for feeding Violet’s customers, and it was all they could do that warm summer to keep ahead of the salad preparation — and business just kept coming the way of the Violet Café.
On the morning of the wedding, Wallace had such a bad bout of influenza, which had been coming on all week, that he couldn’t get out of bed. Belle, who hadn’t caught the bug, said it was a shame but she could manage on her own. She dressed herself with care, in a dusky pink dress with horizontal pleats across the breast, usually kept for special occasions in the church, a matching hat with a rolled brim that framed her face, and white gloves that reached her elbows. She dabbed something out of a mysterious bottle, which she kept in her top drawer, around her throat and in the crooks of her elbows. Wallace, watching these preparations from the bed, was vaguely aware that he should be doing something to stop her, but his temperature was a hundred and three. He supposed that she must have cleared it with her father to go on her own, but his throat was so raw he couldn’t frame the words to ask her.
Perhaps it was because she’d been ill, as her mother and Wallace saw it, that she was allowed to accept the invitation to Hester’s wedding. A date had been set for her to leave the café and begin the preparations for her own marriage. It had been agreed that Hester would make her wedding dress and even her father considered Hester a virtuous woman. Belle’s family had treated her kindly since the day of her seizure, Wallace handling her as if she were porcelain, and might suddenly break if he was not careful. We should have got the doctor in, her mother said at the time. A passing fit, her father said. He, of all of them, looked at her in a different way, as if trying to measure some change in her. Belle was scared when he looked at her like this, because he knew her better than anyone.
