Songs from the Violet Cafe (17 page)

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.

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.’