Songs from the Violet Cafe (18 page)

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 man 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.

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.’

‘All right then,’ said Jessie, pulling out a ten-shilling note, all the money she had to last her the week. Suddenly she craved to read again, and already she had chosen a pile of books: Sholokov’s
And
Quiet
Flows
the
Don,
a book of poems by T.S. Eliot,
A
Beginner’s
Guide
to
Classical
Mythology.
She would finish the letter to her mother when she got back to the boarding house. Or the next morning, because had decided that tonight she really would tackle Violet about going home one long weekend. Violet must let her have some time off sooner or later. When she got back to her room, Marianne was packing her bags.

‘You’re leaving now?’ she said.

Marianne hesitated. ‘Kevin’s been transferred,’ she said. ‘I’m taking his room.’

‘Marianne, you said you were going to be an actress.’

‘What’s it to you? You’ve got a room to yourself, isn’t that enough?’

‘I don’t see how you can go on the way you are, that’s all.’

‘So you’re the expert on how one goes on. I heard how you and John had all your vital organs glued to each other at the wedding. That’s not fucking, Jessie, that’s making an exhibition of yourself.’

‘Where were you that night?’ said Jessie, flushing. ‘With Lou Messenger? Was it him who took your photographs?’

‘You snooping bitch.’

Marianne looked so angry, Jessie thought she might hit her. She put the books on her bed and edged towards the door. Marianne slumped down on her bed, her fingers knotting a small embroidered handkerchief.

‘He’s your married man, isn’t he?’ Jessie said.

‘He was.’ Marianne’s voice was miserable and small. ‘I see him all the time and he’s driving me crazy, or I don’t see him and that’s driving me crazier still. You don’t know what it’s like. I go and visit Evelyn because she still expects me to, asks me why I don’t come, and I make excuses, then I do go there and he’s not there. We sit round and make small talk, the three of us, Evelyn’s mother looking as miserable as sin, and me wanting to say, me too, I want to know where he is too, and Evelyn with that long face of hers, and her head that’s already left home. Evelyn wants me to go flatting with her in Auckland — she’s supposed to go and live in a women’s hostel but she’s not that keen. You know what she’s like, she can’t stand people near her, although she tries. She’d never have got through sharing a room like you and I have this summer. Besides, I can’t do that — it’s just another way of getting close to him. It would make me feel ashamed.’

‘It’s him that should be ashamed.’

‘Ashamed. Oh, Jessie, you don’t know half of it. He was one of my mother’s boyfriends, before she got her hooks into Derek.’

‘Marianne.’

‘There you go, shocked again. There’s nothing really shocking about sex, it’s just the way it messes up your head. You’ll find out sooner or later.’

‘I know that already.’

‘You’re kidding yourself. Still, I guess it’s nice to keep oneself for marriage, as Hester would say.’

‘I miss Hester. Do you think she’s all right?’

‘Hester? Of course she is. She’s got her heart’s desire. Lucky old Hester.’

‘I’ll miss you too.’

‘Like bloomers. I’ll just be along the passage.’

‘I still think you should leave.’

‘What about you? Do you really want to live at the Violet Café for the rest of your life?’ Marianne indicated the pile of books on the bed.