Songs from the Violet Cafe (2 page)

When he first met Ming nobody could afford luxuries like piano tuning, but now that it was wartime, everyone wanted their pianos to sing for them. His hearing, though, was all but gone, the part of his listening skill that followed a scale like an animal after its prey, separating one interval from another. None of this worried Ming, the woman from Huang Shan, the Yellow Mountain. Slowly he learned of her past, of the mountain shrouded with mist and pine trees and fantastic rocks, of her favourite peak, Shi Xin Feng, the Beginning to Believe Peak, of her work in the rice fields, the growing and preparation of food.

She said she liked it where they lived. It reminded her of home, especially the hot springs, for in her village there were clear springs that maintained a warm steady temperature and never ran dry, even in the worst droughts, of which there were many; times when poor people like her came close to starvation. She had seen the springs and the sapling pine trees that grew in plantations as a sign that this was where they should seek land for a market garden. It will be all right, she told him, if I stay with you I will find food and harmony enough for both of us. Music that came from a piano was music made by man, she believed, but the sun, the mountains and the earth itself vibrated with never-ending frequencies. The seventh dragon is the dragon that listens, she said. You must not let the dragon lie down just because you can’t fix the black boxes that stand in the corner of ladies’ parlours. Ming had never attended a concert, had no wish to. She was unmoved by Western music, but not, she insisted, by music itself. He thought of
that, watching the oars dipping and rising as the other woman rowed towards him across the mirror-glass lake and supposed that, even at this minute, he was hearing a kind of music, coming closer and increasingly persistent. When she was a child, he had tuned the piano at her parents’ house. It was an ordinary enough little instrument but when it was tuned the child, Violet, produced a sound radiant with possibility. I sound awful, she would complain when he turned up at her house on his travels through the country (for he was a known expert in those days and it was only his friendship with her father that took him to the out-of-the-way place where they lived). When he left Violet absorbed over the keyboard, he thought it was worth the visit, even though he wasn’t paid. He never thought of not returning.

‘Tell me,’ Ming asked, ‘who is coming? Who is this woman?’

‘She’s the person who wrote me a letter,’ Hugo told her. ‘The letter that came a while back. I think I mentioned it to you.’ Not that he had read the letter to her, or discussed it. More like an implication that he’d had a letter from an old friend. Nothing much. I used to tune this person’s piano, he might have said. A word of advice, a note of warning. Any of these ways he might have described the letter, but he had said nothing.

‘What does she want?’ Ming stood in front of him, making quite sure that he saw her lips making the question.

‘I don’t know exactly. She’s in some kind of trouble.’

‘That.’ Ming turned away, her voice contemptuous, as if she perceived already that the woman’s difficulties were different from her own. ‘She is sometime wife?’

‘Not wife.’ Ming never complained about anything. This transparent note of anger, even jealousy, about a woman she had not met and of whom he had never spoken, was alien and alarming. He had learnt to love Ming, the woman from Yellow Mountain. How could he begin to explain the role this other one had played in his life? Or, in that of Ming herself?

The woman was now so close he could make out her features, but she rested more often on the oars, as if she had become tired. Or afraid.

As if reading his thoughts, Ming said, ‘Maybe bad woman.’

‘Not,’ he said, straightening himself. ‘Not bad.’ The boat was within hailing distance. A fleet of shoreline ducks followed in its wake. The woman would see smoke rising from the chimney behind them. He had loved three women in his time and two of them were about to meet each other. Inwardly, he cursed himself for his evasion, the way he had put off telling Ming about Violet’s letter.

‘Over here,’ he called. Turning to Ming, he said, ‘She’s asked that we look after a child.’

Ming gave a startled cry. ‘A child? That child?’ Her eyes darted towards the boat, then wildly around the smoking garden as if seeking a way of escape.

‘A little boy,’ he said, looking away. ‘Her father was my friend.’

‘You knew,’ his wife said. ‘You knew she bring a little boy.’

He walked towards the water’s edge, the water slopping around the ankles of his rubber boots as he stepped out to catch the bow and bring the boat round, running his hand over the familiar timber. He knew this boat, wondered how she had come by it. The woman looked up at him with those astonishing, brilliant eyes of hers, her mouth, always too large for the oval of her face, parted with exertion. He was shocked to see how roughened and dark her skin had become. She was dressed in a light cotton shirt and trousers, like a man, the pale ash-brown hair, already threaded with grey, tied carelessly behind her head. The collar of her shirt was open and he saw that her throat at least was still the colour of an arum lily, remembering the small muscles that rippled there, never still even when she was not talking or laughing.

‘Hugo,’ she said, looking up with such pained recognition that he understood again how much he too had changed. She turned to pick up the drowsing child beside her. The boy was perhaps two years old, round-eyed and small-boned with a large head of dense hair supported on the slender thread of his neck, one hand curled over the edge of the blanket wrapped around him. Hugo thought he saw a resemblance between them, but perhaps it was his overheated imagination.

‘Moses in the bulrushes,’ she said, pulling a face.

‘Violet, this is Ming,’ he said, as his wife advanced on them. Ming had drawn herself up to her full five feet. She glared hard at the woman, almost causing her to turn away.

‘You’ve told her?’ Violet said, when Ming didn’t respond to the introduction.

‘You have to speak loud,’ Ming said in a scornful voice.

‘I haven’t asked her,’ he said, humbled.

‘We have enough children here,’ said Ming.

‘What a hell of a place to live,’ the woman said, offering up the child. Ming held her arms by her side. ‘Why here?’

‘Because of the war,’ Ming said, before he could answer. ‘They think I am Japanese woman.’ She held the other woman’s eye steadily. ‘Japanese, phoo. They know nothing here, they think everyone looks the same.’

He was taken aback, hearing this blunt statement of the necessity of their lives. Ming had never spoken of her need to be invisible. Sometimes he wondered whether she was even aware of it. Already, he thought, things are changed.

‘You will come into our house, please,’ Ming said to their visitor.

‘I don’t want to stay,’ said the woman. She spoke to Ming more loudly than was necessary, as if it was she who was hard of hearing, then flushed when she realised what she had done. She tried to speak more evenly. ‘I’ve come to bring the boy. His name is Wing Lee.’

‘Your baby?

‘My friend’s child. I’ve told your husband, he knows about him.’ Despite her determination, her voice had begun to rise in a shrill and frantic way. ‘Take him quickly. I can’t stay. I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to get here but the ship was holed on the way out from England, it was terrible, it was taking water and we were going for the lifeboats but the captain told us to hold on harder, and we were rescued. We slept on the deck of a dirty little steamer that took weeks to get here. I can’t tell you how bad it’s been.’

‘I think this is your child.’ Ming’s words were flat and unfriendly.

‘As I said. My friend’s child. I can’t keep him in London, there are bombs falling all the time, and my daughter’s gone to the country.’

‘So. You have a child already?’

‘A girl of my own. Yes.’

‘But this child. He is a Chinese baby, like my youngest one, a little Chinese, a little not Chinese.’

‘His mother is dead, she was killed by the bombs. Whoosh. Boom.’

‘There’s no need for that,’ said Hugo sharply. ‘She understands what a bomb is.’

The woman coloured again. ‘I’m sorry, Hugo.’

‘So,’ Ming said, ‘you can come many miles far, but you cannot keep your friend’s child. You’d better come inside now.’

Hugo lifted Wing Lee out of the woman’s arms, although for a moment the child fought him, clinging to Violet. When he had prised him away, Hugo cradled his head against his shoulder. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said to Violet, ‘but you see how it is. There’s a way it must be done. She won’t just take him in.’

‘Not even if you tell her to?’

He allowed himself a smile. ‘Things are all very equal here.’

‘A modern household. Well, it’s not what I expected.’

They followed Ming into the house.

Don’t go, he had said when Violet prepared to leave, the day after Magda’s funeral. I need you here. When he thought about it now, he was ashamed of that weak moment of longing. Looking back, he thought how piteous he must have sounded. All the same, he had pleaded with her. I know it’s not right with Magda just gone but, well, you know how it is, a fellow gets lonely on his own. When she was silent, he’d said, you feel it too, I can tell. They were sitting in the bay window of the small bungalow he rented in Ponsonby, looking out on a clutter of ramshackle cottages with wet washing flapping on the clotheslines.

Don’t be silly, Hugo, she said then, I’ve got all my life worked out. I’ve had time to think.

What was it, he wanted to know. What sort of life?

A reckless life, she told him, and he remembered the rich way she
laughed, as if she had grown up and grown away even then.

As she walked shoulder to shoulder with him from the shore of the lake towards the house, he thought that’s how it will have been. Reckless. But not without regrets. I’d do anything for you, he told her when she left. Anything at all. Only, now he was to be put to the test, he didn’t know whether he could deliver. He was married to a woman of such strong disposition that once she made up her mind it was almost impossible to change it.

He’d asked Ming, more than once, how she had survived all those years on her own, that period of her life when she was in China and she was a wife but not a wife.

Through meditation and discipline, she told him. I went to the mountain for inspiration. More than that. She had gone underground into the caves, with hundreds of people at a time, fasting in total darkness, only a ration of water and an apple to sustain them. Her spirit was purged, tempered, ready for what might befall her. She was not like the reed in her picture that hung in its shabby splendour above the smoking fireplace. She didn’t bend this way and that.

Ming took her place at the wooden bench that ran down one side of the main room, picking up a knife with a long flashing blade to continue the task of food preparation, begun earlier in the day. She took a handful of green vegetables from a bin and chopped them on a board with long hard strokes. ‘Always, there is a friend,’ she said, tossing the remark over her shoulder.

‘What do you mean?’ asked Violet.

‘I told her you were the daughter of my friend,’ Hugo said.

Ming took two plucked ducks from a platter, their heads and beaks still attached to their bodies, and rinsed them in a bowl of bloodied water. ‘Friends,’ she said, derisively.

‘That was all,’ he said, finally provoked into reminding her that he was, after all, her husband. ‘She wants us to take this baby and care for him, because her husband’s at war and he’s been injured. Soon he’ll come back from the hospital and Violet will have to be free to look after him. She’ll give us some money now and send more each month.’

Ming cleared fat from the birds’ body and neck cavities. She mixed chopped onion and celery with spices and a dash of rationed sugar, and soy sauce tipped out of a Mason jar. Violet opened a thin canvas purse slung over her shoulder and extracted a wad of notes. ‘There’s three hundred pounds here.’ She laid the money out on the table in front of them.

Ming eyed the money, her eyes at once covetous and contemptuous. It was easy to see how much she wanted the money, how much easier it would make their lives. ‘I think,’ she said. ‘After food, I tell you.’

‘I can’t eat,’ the other woman said. She glanced round with evident distaste for her poor surroundings, a fretful child near the bench.

‘That boy needs sleep,’ Ming said to Hugo. ‘Put him down.’

He laid Wing Lee on a blanket roll near the fire, tucking the covering around him. As soon as the child touched its soft fabric his eyes snapped into sleep. A silence settled over them. Violet sat down, her hands folded awkwardly in front of her, watching Wing Lee.

‘Come into the garden,’ said Hugo abruptly, after a time in which nobody had spoken. ‘I’ll show you round the place.’

Ming didn’t look at them as they left the room. The atmosphere was alive with her reproach. Outside, a light wind had risen, so that the surface of the lake stirred.

‘I really should get going,’ the woman said, ‘it’ll be dark soon.’

‘I’ll get one of the boys to row back with you later.’ He nodded to two young men carrying sickles and rakes and spades, as they finished their day’s work in the garden. They were swarthy young men with handkerchiefs tied around their heads, wearing old mended clothes. They passed her with curious glances. One of them shrugged, and spat on the ground, but he could have just been clearing phlegm from the back of his throat. He pointed to the boat, saying something quick and sharp in Mandarin.

‘My sons,’ Hugo said. ‘Chun and Tao.’

‘Surely not. They’re too old.’

‘I adopted them. I’m their father. It’s not that difficult.’

‘Neither of them wanted to go back to China?’

‘Well.’ He hesitated, because this was something he had wondered about himself, but his sons had never told him, and he hadn’t liked to ask. ‘I think they’re people of China, but there’s no way back for them really. I wish they’d come here earlier because it hasn’t been easy for them at school. The younger one could have gone to university, but it’s too late now. His mother was disappointed, but I’m sure he’ll be persuaded to leave here. He doesn’t say much. And then we have one of our own, a late surprise, although I’m afraid Joe’s life will be difficult. A problem at birth. Ming feels it’s her fault, but it was a medical problem.’