Songs from the Violet Cafe

by Fiona Kidman

  In the church, Belle felt alien. All the stained-glass windows and dark panelled wood seemed ostentatious, as if she was one step away from the dreaded portals of Rome, even though it was the Church of England. The music began traditionally enough with ‘Here Comes the Bride’, which reassured her, because that was exactly the music she intended to have at her own wedding, but then Hester walked up the aisle, on the arm of a cousin on her father’s side, who had flown all the way from England for just this duty, followed by Jessie Sandle, transformed into a stately Grecian-looking girl, and she was distracted by the gasps all around her. The train of Hester’s wedding dress shimmered for yards down the aisle, encrusted with crystals and silver beads that shone under the lights of the church in a fiery incandescent glow. Thousands and thousands of them, perhaps hundreds of thousands, the newspaper reported in its wedding pages, and when Hester stepped up to meet Owen at the altar, the train collapsed over the step in a bright waterfall. Hester’s face shone pinkly under the cloud of veil that obscured her face, and Belle thought that perhaps she would look like this when she married Wallace, though the dress was unattainable, unrepeatable, a miracle of devotion.

  As Belle looked up, she saw Lou Messenger standing at the end of the opposite pew with his family, and she found she couldn’t stop looking at him, nor he at her, so that all the lovely words of the service washed over them. She remembered the moment when she had seen him in his car and she couldn’t have explained it, but a look of recognition had passed between them. Once or twice, Belle shook her head and tried to look away, but he was impossible to resist. She found herself shaping words she had never spoken to anyone. I love you. He nodded in agreement and for a moment she thought that he was going to cross the aisle there and then, but with an effort, he turned towards the ceremony, so that they both heard Hester saying ‘I do’, and watched her raise her shining rosy face to Owen’s. The Chinese man, Harry, standing to Owen’s right, presented the ring to be slipped on Hester’s finger, and Ruth Hagley, between the wife of the cousin from England and Violet Trench, sat up straighter and put her chin in the air. Marianne Linley sat in the pew behind them, alongside John Wing Lee, and his brother’s wife. Marianne wore a cream hat with a tiny veil shading her eyes.

  The wedding reception was held upstairs in the tearooms at the swimming baths in the public gardens. Violet Trench had offered the café, but the venue had been booked for nearly a year and the deposit paid. This was back when Violet and Ruth were still not talking to each other. Besides, it was agreed, Hester should have her wedding where there was enough space for everyone to dance. The café had a dance floor only the size of a postage stamp, not enough room for Hester to show off her fine train. She and Owen had hired a group of musicians who’d played at the Ballroom on Saturday nights for years, and they’d got to know them.

  Belle ate tiny cucumber sandwiches and drank a glass of fizzy wine before the meal began. Between the main course and desserts, and before the speeches began, she slipped out of the room, down the stairs and out into the late afternoon air. She walked past the bath houses, to where Lou’s red and white car was parked. He followed, not far behind, as if it really didn’t matter that they were seen, catching up with her at the car, and opening the door for her. Belle found herself almost sobbing with the relief.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘I’m here now.’

  He drove with one hand on the steering wheel, the other pulling her close to him so that she was almost in his lap. They drove through the streets of the town, past the geysers, and out towards the open road that led to the forests, without either of them speaking. He kept driving south until they came to a dirt road that led off the highway, one of the logging roads going into the heart of the pines, and when that ran out they kept on going until there was just a path into the beech forests. They got out and walked between the trees, the branches forming a high canopy above them. Beneath them lay a soft carpet of dry leaves.

  She leaned into him.

  ‘You’re not ever going to leave me, are you?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. Because already something told her that he would become her past, the best thing that ever happened to her.

  Marianne left the reception early too. She saw Lou leave, and waited ten minutes or so, so as not to seem as if she was following him. But he had vanished into thin air. She walked disconsolately down to the lakefront, her needle-point shoes pinching her toes. The boat was anchored in its usual spot, too far away from the shore for her to go aboard. She called his name once or twice.

  Harry made a speech. He said: ‘Owen and Hester, I am wishing you in this year of 1964, good health and good appetite. Now you are married, I wish you to love each other more and more and have a smart little baby. Enjoy your life.’

  Violet Trench raised her glass to propose a toast to Owen and Hester, ‘the best worker I’ve ever had’.

  To Hester and Owen, they all chorused. Below the tearooms the pale silky blue water in the baths trembled in the heat of the February afternoon. Hester’s glowing eyes never left Owen, her glance travelling wherever he went in the room, even when she was greeting people. Jessie walked around distributing cake from a silver plate, small rich oblong slices, frosted with white icing and knobbly lemon-coloured letters that had read ‘Happily Ever After’, until they were shattered by a knife with a white ribbon tied around its handle.

  ‘Save the last dance for me,’ said John, when she delivered him his slice. He was hanging out with his brother Harry, who seemed uncomfortable and sweaty in his trim grey suit that matched Owen’s, although his wife Ann was working the room as if it were her own wedding. Harry looked Jessie up and down and uttered a grunt, shaking his head.

  ‘Take no notice,’ John said.

  Evelyn and Freda and David sat at a table talking to Patrick Trimble, the bookseller, who filled Freda’s glass several times when she was not looking with sweet white wine. Ruth had decided that it would reflect badly on her if she didn’t invite the opposition. Freda wore a strawberry hat with a brim, and Evelyn a straw boater which Jessie thought suited her better than anything she’d seen her wearing before.

  ‘I’m sure I don’t know why Hester didn’t ask you to be her bridesmaid,’ Freda said to Evelyn, in her clear broadcasting tones, when she thought (or did she?) that Jessie was out of earshot. ‘I am supposed to be a friend of her mother’s.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Evelyn.

  ‘Although I don’t know that I’d want you in tow with that Chinaman they’ve lined up.’

  ‘Mum, don’t.’

  ‘Where’s your father?’ Freda said, appearing to notice his absence for the first time.

  ‘How should I know? Perhaps he just wanted a breath of fresh air.’

  And it was scorching in the room, in spite of the fans.

  John’s suit fitted against the green satin dress so tightly that people turned to give him and Jessie knowing looks, and the older women pursed their lips. He was exactly the same height as Jessie, his cheek against hers, they were dancing so close that they simply put their arms around each other and swayed. John hummed in her ear. ‘You’re the girl for me,’ he said.

  ‘Why?’ she said. ‘Why me?’ Evening had fallen, and they all looked different and beautiful, Jessie thought, as if their unscripted lives were becoming more connected. Although, she saw uneasily, that some of them were missing.

  Violet gave John and Jessie a long look, as she danced with the butcher, Shorty Toft, whom Ruth had felt compelled to invite because his shop was just down the road from hers, so they’d been neighbours of a sort for decades. Violet looked beyond Shorty’s shoulder and gave a little grimace in the direction of Felix Adams on the other side of the room. She rested two fingers of her left hand on Shorty’s right shoulder and let her other hand balance like a hovering insect, so that he couldn’t grasp it properly. All the same, she laughed as if she was enjoying a joke; her feet were light and so, surprisingly, were his, big ma
n though he was. David was dancing with Evelyn, who had taken off her straw hat. Her straight dress was a trifle narrow, and David was not skilful on his feet. Still, they persevered, waltzing in a strict one two three at the edges of the parquet floor, so that they didn’t bump into each other, apologising now and then for battered toes. In a pause in the music, David reminded Evelyn that he was on late shift at the radio station, and that he had to leave her now. When he walked her back to the side of the room, Patrick Trimble offered to walk downtown with him, almost as if he were a girl needing an escort, but David said no, thanks very much, it was okay. He’d see them all later. He looked over at John and Jessie and they smiled and waved to him, releasing each other from their embrace. David blinked, his thin white face more red-eyed than usual, and disappeared into the early evening.

  Hester and Owen whirled around the room once more, faster and faster, in a dream-like trance, until it was time for all of them to stop.

  THE GATHERING UP OF THE DAY

  Wallace had decided to walk down to the café and meet Belle. He had been feeling lately that he was not giving her enough time and attention, and he wanted to reassure her that he did love her and that being married to each other would be as blissful as they had always imagined. She had appeared restless. He put it down to the culmination of patient years of praying and preparation, and reminded himself that she was still a young girl with a great deal of responsibility to face. He was proud of the way money was accumulating in their savings account. Between them, they had enough money for their furniture as well as the deposit on their house, and it would only be a matter of months now before everything changed and it would be just the two of them except when they entertained the parishioners of the Church of Twenty, or her family. Belle would be a grown-up matron, rather than a girl in her father’s house. Wallace heard music and laughter coming from the café, and it sounded like the brazen revelry of infidels.

  As he neared the corner by the lake, a couple walked towards him, away from the street lights, although a dim light still illuminated their shadowy embrace. The man had pressed the woman towards him, one hand cupping her bottom and drawing it in to him, the other her head, so that his fingers were spread across her skull, holding it while he kissed her on the lips. The woman allowed him to do this, putting her arms round him so that they appeared to be melting together. He thought he recognised the man as Louis Messenger. The woman he knew — it was Belle.

  Wallace stood still under the tree and watched to see what happened next. The couple eventually broke their mesmerised embrace and walked a few steps towards a car parked further along the road. Lou opened the door for Belle and she got in beside him, and in a moment the car started up and drove away.

  At first Wallace thought he must have imagined it, hoped that he might wake from this nightmare, but when he moved his feet and legs they were real, and he had control over them, even though they trembled.

  He walked home, got into his empty bed and waited. An hour passed and then two. At last she came in, quietly closing the door behind her, as she always did. There was no sound of a car to be heard, so he guessed she had been dropped off some little way away, so that she could walk home as she had on other nights, although how many other times she had practised this deception he was only beginning to consider.

  When she was in the room, he reached out and put the light on. She looked at him with her big round blue eyes, suddenly afraid.

  But he smiled at her, a big welcoming smile that she didn’t trust. ‘Take your clothes off,’ he said. ‘All of them. For me.’

  That was the night before.

  Violet’s day started well or, at least, in a way that delivered her unexpected amusement. She parked the blue Volkswagen outside the butcher’s shop, checking her make-up in the rear-vision mirror, and smoothing a velvet eyebrow with her finger tip before she alighted. The sky was such a radiant astonishing blue that for a moment she stood absorbed as if magically a part of it. It was still early in the morning, and she knew that it would soon be hot. A day for fans in every corner of the café, and the windows open towards the water.

  ‘A right scorcher coming up,’ said Shorty, by way of greeting. Already he had shavings of bone and fat speckled along the hairs on his thick forearms. ‘What are we doing working on a day like this?’

  ‘Well, some of us have to make a living, Shorty.’

  ‘I don’t know about that, Mrs Trench. I’m just about ready to hang up my apron. Thirty-five years in the trade seems long enough.’

  ‘You’re joking,’ she said. ‘What would I do without you?’

  ‘That’s what I reckon, Mrs Trench. You’d be lost without me. I’ve got a special present for you this morning.’

  ‘A present?’

  He slapped a tray down in front of her containing a large ox heart that looked as if it had barely stopped beating. A vein of fat ran along its left ventricle.

  ‘A heart. What would I do with that?’

  ‘Ah, now that’s a good question. You never see recipes for heart meat, d’you?’

  ‘I don’t think my patrons would like finding heart on their menu. It’s strange the way a heart is viewed.’

  ‘Exactly.’ He scratched his short stubbly hair with a bloodied finger and grinned at her. ‘We don’t eat hearts, Mrs Trench, unless we’re cats. We give them.’ He pulled the tray back towards him and looked at it proudly, his joke to start the morning off. ‘Just remember, I’m offering you a heart that big.’

  She laughed, with a touch of uncertainty, and smiled at him. He smiled back, his expression seemingly easy and amicable, his eyes more difficult to read. She started her task of choosing the day’s meat.

  When she got in the car, she held onto the steering wheel for a few moments, before moving off, knowing he was still watching her from behind the plate-glass window of the red shop.

  Ever since Hester had asked Jessie to be her bridesmaid, and Violet had invited her to be her apprentice, Marianne had hardly spoken to Jessie, except to tell her that it was time to put out the light, when Jessie wanted to read at nights (she had found an old pile of Zane Grey westerns and some discarded Woman’s Weeklys in the laundry), and that she was moving at the end of the month. If she was still seeing her married man, Jessie couldn’t tell. She and Marianne hadn’t been anywhere together for a month or more. Jessie was working longer hours than Marianne, because now she was cooking for Violet Trench there was food preparation to be done before the café opened. Marianne didn’t go out early any more, and slept a lot, as if she was exhausted all the time. John told Jessie that Sybil Linley had left town, trailing debts like confetti. Gone after a man, he’d heard, a young man at that.

  ‘Was it Derek?’ Jessie asked.

  He looked at her curiously. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘perhaps she just got a taste for young guys. I’ve heard some women are like that.’

  If Marianne knew any of this, she gave no hint. Soon after John told Jessie about Sybil, Jessie saw Marianne’s back huddled against her beneath the bedclothes again, and decided that her own days had become empty except for the time she spent at the café. There was nothing she could do in the room while Marianne slept.

  Jessie dressed quietly, tucked a small pad in her white canvas shoulder bag, and let herself out. The day was light and fresh, full of promise. She walked through the town, down towards the gardens where canna lilies stood like bright flags, and planned how she would sit on the library’s balcony, and write a letter to her mother.

  The library had french doors that led outside to the balcony and another long garden, filled with rose bushes. Morning sun flooded the area and illuminated the spines of books on the shelves behind her. When she tried to write her letter, she found it harder than she expected, as if there was nothing much she could tell her mother any more, nothing her mother would understand.

  Sometimes, Mum, I feel as if I’m living in a cell, I can see so much beyond where I am now, but I can’t reach it, and I don’t know
whether it’s what I want anyway. Other times I’m so overwhelmed with happiness and being here in the moment of what’s happening to me that it’s unbearable. You’ll have worked out that I’m in love and you’ll be saying that I’m too young and if you met him I’m not sure that you’d approve. I’m not sure whether my life’s here or not.

  When she read through what she had written, she folded the page over in the pad. The heat on the balcony was becoming intense, so she moved to the shade inside. The neat rows of books seemed like a reproach. It was months since she had opened one that mattered, as if she had become some other person from the diligent student she had been. On an impulse, she asked at the desk if she might join the library.

  ‘Are you a visitor, or a permanent resident here?’ asked the girl behind the desk.

  ‘What’s the difference?’

  ‘You have to pay a deposit if you’re a visitor. We return it when you leave, provided all your books are back. It’s ten shillings,’ the girl added, as if she had already decided Jessie’s status. ‘And you can only take four books, not six, like the permanents.’

  Jessie explained that she lived at the boarding house.

  ‘That’s not a permanent address,’ the girl said. ‘Sorry.’