Songs from the Violet Cafe (11 page)

The house where Marianne had a room and a share of the bathroom, so long as she didn’t take a shower more than every second day, was down a side street between the main street and the swimming baths. The carpet crawled with floribunda roses.

The night Hugo died, Marianne had said to Jessie, ‘Well, you have to stay somewhere. There’s a spare bed in the room where I stay.’

‘I thought there might have been a Y somewhere, like in Wellington.’

Marianne had snorted through her finely flared nose. ‘Young Women’s Christian Association. You won’t find that around here. Unless you want to go home to Belle’s, which is a Christian association I’d be inclined to give a miss.’

The beds in the room they shared were covered by pink candlewick bedspreads with crisp worn tufts. The mattresses dipped in the centre when the beds were tightly made up. If Jessie and Marianne were to reach out their hands from their beds at the same time, their fingers would meet in the middle of the room. Not that they did this.

Three mornings a week, Marianne got up early and went out. She said she was doing some modelling work on the side. The assignments were a secret. All she would say is that it got damned cold out there in the dew, and that she was going to leave town as soon as she’d got some money together. If Violet found out she was leaving, she might give her the sack.

‘Where will you go?’ Jessie asked.

‘I’d like to go on the stage, get some training in drama, if I can find someone to teach me. I was Columbine in the school play, and I brought the house down. You should do something about yourself, Jessie. You’re really quite attractive.’

In the mornings, after Marianne had gone, Jessie tidied up the piles of clothing lying on the floor and used the Hoover the landlady
left in the passage to vacuum up loose threads and face powder and hair clips that Marianne had left lying around, and wiped down the surface of the dressing table with a damp rag. It reminded her of home.

‘Well, that’s something,’ the landlady said, watching her out of the corner of her eye one morning, when she replaced the Hoover. ‘You should have seen the pigsty they made of the sitting room.’

Jessie didn’t know who the landlady was talking about. There were two other boarders in the house, David Finke, the young man from the radio station, and Kevin who was the pay clerk in the Forestry Department. Kevin was a stubby middle-aged man with puffy cheeks. He was engaged to be married, and soon, thank God, he would be transferred away. Kevin used the sitting room nowadays, and Marianne not at all.

‘It’s a bit amusing,’ the landlady said, watching Jessie at work with the Hoover, ‘her going off to clean up someone else’s mess, while you clean up hers. At least she gets paid.’

‘But, I thought …’ Jessie began, and then stopped. The modelling was a secret.

‘This is a quality house,’ the landlady said, ‘there’ll be no more shenanigans.’ So something had happened here, but Jessie didn’t know what it was, didn’t think it would be right to ask. She sensed Marianne’s relief when she came back to the order she had created.

The house where Hester and Ruth lived spoke of faded affluence and charm, a bungalow with a Spanish Mission influence, its walls clad with white stucco. Although the garden was more or less abandoned, there were outlines of scattered vegetable garden plots, and late grape hyacinths sheltering beneath overgrown hedges. Inside the house, dark brown curtains with braided fringes almost covered the windows, creating constant dimness. The lampshades were strung with crystal beads, and their dull pumpkin light glimmered on round inlaid and brass tables from the East. A servery hatch divided the kitchen from the dining room and alongside it stood a tea wagon. Hester worked at her sewing on the oak dining-room table, with its
barley-twist legs. Each day before she began, she laid a heavy felt overlay on the table to protect its surface.

Her fiancé Owen came in from the farm where he worked, which grazed a bit of livestock for slaughter, as well as running a dairy herd. He appeared mostly on Tuesdays when he was on his way to the cattle sales. Owen was tall and fair, and people seemed to think he was nice-looking, except for his lazy left eye, which made his gaze travel in two different directions. When he came into the room where Hester was working, she got up at once from whatever she was doing, putting her face up to be kissed.

Owen brought eggs, and sometimes a piece of meat from the farm, which he thought perhaps Hester and her mother could use. (He spoke with determined cheerfulness whenever Ruth was mentioned.) He stayed and made cups of tea and told Hester about butterfat and which paddocks he needed to put the cows in the next day. She asked him to measure windows so that she could start running up curtains for the cottage, and chivvied him along about deciding on his best man. She frowned and sighed over his first choice because, she said, he might be too short for Susan when it came to the photographs. Not that it really mattered, she supposed, seeing that it was Owen’s very best friend, and that was all that mattered. Susan was a girl she knew at boarding school. She lived for sport — hockey in the winter and cricket in the summer. What with practice and one thing and another, she hadn’t had time to make the trip from the Waikato for a fitting of her dress. Hester was sure this would all get sorted out sooner or later. Soon her conversation with Owen resumed its normal rhythms, going round and round, as if they so liked the sound of each other’s voices that there was no need to think of new things to say. They talked about ballroom dancing and tangos, and sometimes they stood holding each other and did little bouncing skipping sorts of dances, pointing their heads and arms from side to side, and humming under their breaths.

‘What will you do when you’ve finished all this?’ Owen asked, pointing at the froth of tulle and lace on the table.

‘Well,’ said Hester, stopping in the middle of a turn, ‘there’s this
girl who’s come to work at the café who doesn’t seem to have anything to wear. I thought I could help her out.’

‘Don’t you have enough to do?’

‘I feel rather sorry for her. I think she should go home, she doesn’t really seem to fit in here,’ Hester said.

‘I don’t think you should get involved,’ Owen said, unusually sharp for him.

‘Oh sweetheart, I only want to help.’

‘It’s time you got away from it all. I wish we could just slip off and get married now without a fuss.’

‘Don’t be silly, sweetheart,’ Hester said, in a fond daffy voice. She and Owen had been engaged for five years, and she’d been looking forward to a summer wedding all those days and nights.

Mid-afternoon at the Violet Café, early summer perched on the lake, the blueness of the sky melting into the water. That water so still the black swans repeated themselves in perfect mirror reflection, their necks elongated in space.

Jessie came to pick up her pay because it was Thursday, the day wages were paid, and also the day her rent was due at the boarding house. Violet looked her up and down. ‘You look as if you’ll snap off in the middle. Cook yourself something.’

‘Oh, it’s all right,’ Jessie said, blushing as she spoke.

‘Don’t tell me you’re not hungry.’

It was true, Jessie did feel hungry most of the time, although she found it hard to identify this cavity within as hunger. It was more like rage, and a shapeless sense of desire. She would look back and think that this was what homesickness must feel like. She would never experience this feeling again; in the rest of her life she would become a person who was where she was in a given moment, someone who moved on from place to place, her home often just an address in a phone book in another country. For the moment, she was willing to put this feeling down to hunger of the old-fashioned variety. She and Marianne sometimes ate beans out of tins they heated on the kitchen stove at the boarding house, or leftovers at the Violet Café, scraping
sauce from the pots before Belle put them in the wash, a cold piece of fish, the dregs of vichyssoise, washed down with black coffee or a slug of the teapot wine.

Now that she was being offered food of her choice, Jessie felt overwhelmed with a sudden longing for steak, one of those fat ones she served Violet’s patrons.

‘If you’re sure,’ she said.

‘Yes, go on,’ Violet said. ‘Help yourself.’

Jessie opened the door of the purring Frigidaire and took out a steak, weighing up half a pound of beef in her hand. The meat was a lovely clear colour that she could only describe as meat-red, faintly marbled with fat. With a jolt, she remembered Jock Pawson’s habit of saying, ‘If a working man can’t have half a pound of steak once a week there’s no point in going out to work.’ He had fillet steak on Friday nights while the rest of them ate mince. Jessie chose a gleaming pot hanging from the rail above the stove.

Violet followed her into the kitchen. ‘You’re not going to put steak into that cold pan?’

‘I don’t know,’ Jessie said, almost dropping it. Had she been too greedy? Was she supposed to have chosen something less? An egg, perhaps.

‘Cooking is about science,’ Violet said. ‘You learned some science?’

‘Yes, some. Although languages and history were what I did best.’

‘And then you set yourself to the law?’

‘It seemed like a good career.’

‘And now it doesn’t. Never mind. I learned music when I was a girl, and you might say that’s irrelevant now. Music. Poetry. The sciences. They’re not so far removed from each other, though the science of cooking isn’t taught as such, more’s the pity. What do they call cooking at school — homecraft or some such? Something you take in the first year of high school unless you’re considered dull, in which case you make a career out of baking cakes and stitching hems in preparation for the great day of marriage. Or you’re so terrified of succeeding that, if you’re like Hester, you immerse yourself in
stitching up dream worlds. Cooking isn’t just the craft of the moment, it’s a lifelong commitment. To cook, you need some science.’

‘Really?’ Jessie said, her appetite receding.

‘Cooking’s a simple process of changing the physical and chemical character of certain foods by exposing them to the action of heat,’ Violet continued. ‘For example, what is a steak?’

‘Beef.’ The flesh in her hands was springy and smeared with a light skin of blood. She wished she could put it back in the refrigerator and close the door. Violet took the pan Jessie had chosen, and placed it on the stove, turning up the heat beneath.

‘Indeed, that’s beef,’ Violet said, ‘but steak can be veal or ham or lamb, almost any large animal you can think of. If you reduce your steak to scientific language, it’s protein or albumin. It’s like the white of an egg. If you expose it to heat it coagulates and shrinks. Do you understand?’

‘Yes,’ said Jessie, ‘Should I add butter?’

‘Yes, good.’ Violet handed her a pound of yellow butter, showing her where to cut off a chunk. ‘Not too much. Now, let it melt until it begins to turn brown, don’t mind a little smoke. The butter keeps the meat from burning, because fat is an insulator. The steak won’t burn unless the fat does. Now, quickly, put the steak in the pan, for another minute. The heat will turn the butter into acrolein, which smells like a hot exhaust pipe. Hot but not too hot. If you start with low heat, the meat won’t get that caramelised texture outside, the lovely juices.’

Her discomfort forgotten, Jessie was transfixed by the meat transforming before her, as if she was seeing food cook for the first time. The smell was making her dizzy with pleasure. Like that first day, when John had cooked for her. As the juices eddied round the sides of the pan Violet reached over and turned down the stove.

‘Now it’s ready to eat,’ Violet said, lifting the steak from the pan with a slotted spoon. She scraped the sides, pouring the fragrant sauce beside the steak. ‘A dash of salt, a grind of pepper — go on, take it.’

A shadow had fallen across the doorway. Violet stiffened, without looking up.

‘What do you want, Lou?’

Lou Messenger leaned against the reception desk, an amused look hovering in his eyes, a cigarette balanced by the tip of his tongue beneath his upper lip. Jessie sat down at a table with her plate and began to eat.

‘Whatever it is, you can’t have it,’ Violet said to Lou, her voice sharp.

‘I was thinking of a float in a boat, that’s all. It’s a nice day out there.’

‘There’re no girls here.’ Violet glanced across at Jessie. ‘Only this one.’

All the same, Jessie did go out on Lou’s boat, though not that day. It was an eighteen-foot kauri cabin cruiser painted white, with its name
The
Wench
painted in scarlet letters on the bow. It had a square cabin and, beneath that, two big portholes on either side. The back was open, so that three or four people could sit outside.

Jessie had thought that Evelyn would come with them, but she didn’t. Evelyn and Marianne’s friendship puzzled her. Jessie had heard it said several times that they were best friends at school and that Marianne had often spent time at the Messenger house in the past. Yet Marianne kept her distance from Evelyn, as if she didn’t really want to talk to her. Jessie saw how unhappy this made Evelyn, and couldn’t work out what was going on between them. Often, Evelyn would speak to Marianne in a way that indicated some old easy familiarity, and Marianne would turn away. More than once, Jessie had seen the rush of tears in Evelyn’s dark chocolaty eyes, which she blinked away, before her stony mask fell again.

The day that Marianne and Jessie went out on Lou’s boat, it turned out that Evelyn and her mother had gone up to Auckland, so Evelyn could enrol for her university courses in the new year. Whenever she mentioned the word university in the kitchen, it had been with a tilt of her head, as if it were something unattainable for the rest of them. Jessie hadn’t mentioned how she had spent the past year, and she didn’t think Violet Trench had either.

Marianne was already on board the boat, her head wrapped in a long gold paisley scarf that also wound about her throat, the ends
flying over each shoulder, sunglasses veiling her eyes, her mouth framed with fresh lipstick. In a few minutes they were joined by John, carrying a bag of clanking beer bottles.