Songs from the Violet Cafe (4 page)

‘There, then,' he said, pleased with himself.

Everything her mother did had a cost. Jessie didn't know why she hadn't seen this before. But now she understood in an instant, that this was how it had always been, ever since her mother married Jock. If it hadn't been for her, perhaps her mother might have married better the second time round. Jock, she could see, was the price her mother paid for being alone and having a child, for not always living as a war widow. Her mother might have been in love once, but not
twice. All the same, here she was, married with four children — because, however reluctantly, Jessie had to include herself — turning to Jock Pawson for his charity, even on her daughter's birthday.

On the way home Jessie stared out of the window of the taxi at the hearse-black sky. Of course her mother would be better without her. And yes, it was true, she hated university, or at least legal studies. What arrogance, what a cheek, to think she might become a lawyer. Your Honour, heaven's thought was otherwise; I should have stuck with Virgil. How many women had been admitted to the bar? Why should she make history?

In the morning she said she felt ill and stayed in bed. She waited until her mother left the house to walk Janice to school, because the older children got impatient and didn't wait for her. When the house was empty, she got up and pulled on the clothes she had worn the day before. She went to the main bedroom. It felt like theft, just being in the room, as if she were invading the last vestige of her mother's guilty secrets. The room smelled heavy and musty, the bed unmade, the pillow on Jock's side stained with Brylcreem. The dressing table was thick with bobby pins and talcum powder, as if the room was all too much for Irene to manage, but then most of the house was like that. When she is older, Jessie will sometimes think that if she had just stopped and tidied up that day, things in her life would have been different.

Opening the bottom drawer where the underclothes were kept, she ran her hands along the bottom. The photograph had gone. She tried the upper drawers, hurriedly turning over cardigans and folded blouses, then the top drawer where Irene kept her make-up and old ropes of fake pearls and hat pins.

Nothing.

Jessie decided to take one last look in the shelf where her mother stored a hat box, some out-of-season clothes and a few knick-knacks of baby clothes and mementoes. She came across a small suitcase, one she remembered her mother carrying during their endless shifts between rented rooms when she was a young child. For a moment she weighed it in her hand, before opening it, as if measuring her own
presence in the house. She was possessed with the idea that her mother's life could only get better if she left. Jock was not even a bad man. He tolerated her. That was the hardest part. In the suitcase she found some papers: her own birth certificate, a death certificate for her father, a copy of Jock's and Irene's wills which she didn't open, some old stored accounts bound up with a rubber band. She took the first two items and emptied the rest on the crumpled blue satin eiderdown.

Jessie sat in an olive and mustard-coloured Road Services bus as it trundled through rolling plains, then the wasteland of desert space in the centre of the land, the starry tussock glinting under an erratic sun, the mountains leaning towards her from the west. It had been the first bus leaving Wellington with a spare seat. Her purse contained three pounds ten in notes and loose change and her Post Office savings book showing thirty-five pounds, her entire life savings. As the bus pushed north she saw a line of army tanks ploughing through the grass, firing practice rounds of shells that made puffs of dark smoke, and then the bus descended towards the lake country, the dark iris of Lake Taupo trembling on the horizon, and on past it, until they reached their destination, a town straggling along the shore of another, smaller lake. Had it not been so close to the water, it would have been a plain town, although as she walked its long main street Jessie saw that there were some charming facades on some of the older buildings, something more cosmopolitan than the places she had passed through earlier in the day. She would look back on that long walk through the town and see a reflection of those houses in unexpected places, not just in Sydney, or Island Bay, where she had lived, but in suburban Chicago perhaps, or in the crumbling streets of Asia, in the French arrondissements.

The town unfolded itself before Jessie Sandle and just when she thought there was nowhere else to go, it revealed to her the Violet Café. That evening when she met Violet Trench it was as if nothing of importance had happened to her before and everything from now on would matter.

Derek said that, if it was all right with her, he would come around about seven and Sybil Linley said yes, that was quite all right, she was sure Marianne would be pleased. Sybil liked the way this young man of her daughter's studied the arrangement of roses on her desk, appearing to absorb their fragrance, not exaggerating his interest or pretending to know about flowers.

‘I just never know when she'll be working these days,' he said. He had an athletic grace about him, a ball clutched under his arm, like a schoolboy who couldn't wait to be released.

‘Violet Trench keeps those girls on their toes. A very temperamental woman,' Sybil said. She took a delicate bite of her cheese and grated apple sandwich and eased a crumb from the corner of her mouth with one fingertip. Derek came to see her often. The phone in the house where she and her daughter lodged belonged to their landlady. It was not possible for Marianne and Derek to phone each other casually. Their arrangements often had to be made through her. Marianne sometimes came to town to meet Derek during his lunch hour, but other days she slept late. The hours she kept at the Violet Café were unpredictable. This was why he came by the office most days, to see when Marianne would be free.

Sybil pushed aside the bill of sale she was studying while she finished her lunch, giving him a look she hoped would be disarmingly frank. At forty-five, Sybil knew she was one of the most attractive women of her age in the town. Her large amber eyes were lustrous and faintly slanted at the corners beneath dark impeccably formed brows, and her skin, despite a tiny pouch that had recently formed under her chin, still possessed some of youth's delicacy. She wore, on that late autumn day, a liquorice woollen dress nipped in at the waist, which gave the illusion of a girls figure. People still thought she and her
younger daughter Marianne were sisters when they saw them out together. Her older daughter was already married and had two children of her own. Sybil was grateful that they lived on a farm down south at Featherston.

Sybil didn't consider men a weakness. She worked for a land agent. Selling houses was a business where a woman had to stay on her toes. Men thought they knew more about property, but she had some tricks up her sleeve, or both of them if it came to that, that they never thought of. Things like an appreciation of the finer points of kitchens and the convenience of laundries — all the simple obvious stuff. Perhaps they did think of it, but they didn't know how to present it through a woman's eyes and of course it was women who made the decisions about buying houses, even if the men did make the deposit and signed the mortgage agreements. She had long ago learnt the fine art of allowing men to believe they were making decisions while maintaining the utmost complicity with their wives. Men had their limitations, she believed, but that was no reason to dislike them.

‘I wish Marianne would leave the café,' Derek said. ‘She could get a proper job.' Derek himself worked in the bank across the road. He was head teller but soon they would be moving him up to accounts.

Sybil saw why her daughter yearned for this young man, his murmuring in her ear, and no doubt the sex she assumed had already begun. She could see them together if she imagined it, and she did. He was slightly shorter than Sybil, and than her daughter for that matter, but he had hard young muscles and a strong chest. He played rugby in the weekends. The local newspaper had singled him out as a prospect for a provincial side. She liked men that shape, like barrels with slim hips, especially when they were clothed in nice suits. In some ways he reminded her of Lou Messenger, until recently her lover, although Lou was a more casual sort of man. Thinking of Lou made her heave a small inward sigh of regret. He sold sports goods and fishing tackle, and he was afraid his wife was getting suspicious. That's what he told her. She understood. This sort of thing happened.

‘Well,' she said. ‘Well. The way Violet Trench talks you'd think she was offering the best job in the world down at that café. Of
course, Madame's decidedly above herself, but still she's got class, I'll give her that, a bit of style.'

‘Marianne might as well work in the pub. All sorts of things go on at that place.'

‘Oh come on, Derek, it's not so bad.' Her lunch finished, Sybil folded the brown paper bag into a little square and dropped it in the rubbish bin at her feet. She considered her fingernails, which were buffed and smoothed, the cuticles pushed back to show her strong crescent moons. It was better to take things slowly she decided. This man is not in a hurry to marry, she thought, rubbing the nail with the pad of her thumb. ‘Anyway, what would Marianne do?'

‘She's artistic,' he said, with a touch of irritation. ‘Perhaps she could try teaching, they do lots of art and stuff.'

‘She'd have to go away to do that, go away to get trained.'

‘Yes I suppose she would.'

‘What you mean,' said Sybil, ‘is that you want a long engagement. I'm surprised.'

‘I don't know whether she's ready for all that stuff yet, settling down and everything.' Derek's tone was flat.

‘You know she's mad about you,' Sybil said. ‘I mean, what more do you want?'

When he didn't reply straight away, she said, ‘Well, it's solid work, banking. A good career.' What she meant was, he was respectable and careful. He would become a pillar of the community. He might settle for less than her beautiful daughter, someone with two parents who already had a pastel bathroom of their own. While she was still looking and wondering how far she could stretch the deposit, and how long it would be before she was free of Marianne and could buy one of those nice little one-bedroom flats that she came across now and then in the course of her work. It occurred to her that Derek wouldn't play rugby for much longer. If he had really wanted to be a top player it would probably have happened already. What he wanted, she believed, was to run a bank. If she was any sort of mother, she would warn Marianne, tell her to do something about it, get pregnant, anything at all. She felt a momentary pang of profound
regret. It was not Marianne he had to fear, but a mother without scruples, a divorced woman. Sybil pushed her gold bracelets up her arm and smiled sideways at him. ‘Seven o' clock then, we'll expect you.'

Only, when she got home, Marianne had left a note with the landlady to say she had been called for work. (The landlady took calls if they concerned work. Her tenants did have the rent to pay.) This was more or less what Sybil had expected, given that Belle, who cleaned the café, had become so erratic, as Marianne had described it. She didn't like it, any more than Derek, that Marianne sometimes did cleaning work as well as waitressing at the Violet Café. Sybil knew she should throw herself upon the landlady's forbearance, and ask to use the phone. But the house was quiet, as if she had gone out. There were other tenants in the house, but she thought they must be out too. At least it was a relief not to hear the bad-tempered woman banging around in the kitchen while she boiled meat. Sybil could have gone down to the telephone box on the corner and phoned Derek. He would have had time to go home and change out of his suit into slacks and a pullover as he did most nights before he came to see Marianne. Sometimes the couple would go to the pictures, or they would just go for a drive in his Hillman Hunter. When she came home, Marianne's eyes were always alight, her perfectly shaped top teeth taking excited little bites of her lower lip, as if something momentous had just taken place.

Sybil knew she shouldn't let him visit for nothing. She sat down in a wicker chair with a big cushion behind her and took off her high heels, stretching her nylon-clad legs in front of her. There had been two near sales this week and she was tired of showing people the master bedroom and raving about the size of the linen cupboard. Soon she would have a gin and tonic. She should have something to eat. In the meantime, she would sit for a while and let things take care of themselves. Later on. She couldn't pretend she wasn't waiting for his knock.

When she opened the door to him, she told herself it was all part of an old, old story and you could make up different endings to suit
yourself. On another day it would be different. Sybil lay down on the bed in her room with her daughter's lover and spread herself beneath him, her voluptuous mouth covering him in kisses, and that was where Marianne, who had forgotten her flat-heeled shoes for work, found her very soon after.

That was last autumn and now it was nearly spring and Marianne hadn't seen her mother since. In the evenings, Marianne told herself it was good to be free, not tied to anyone.

When Belle's fiancé, Wallace, had found God it was as if a great white light had been turned on. The light just kept burning and burning with an intensity that made him feel as if he glowed when he walked down the street. Perhaps he felt this way because he was an electrician, used to switching light on and off, understanding and yet not understanding the amazing current that illuminated the world. It seemed natural that he saw himself in terms of light, as if a great neon sign had been erected above him. He was surprised people didn't see him coming. The Lord is truly my Shepherd he said to himself every day. His conversion had begun one night years before when he had gone to hear the word of God preached by Billy Graham, in an Auckland park. At the time, Wallace was hanging out with motorcycle gangs and wore his hair slicked up in a comb. Years later, he learned about movies like
Grease
and thought them profane, as if glamorising all that bad side of his life was unacceptable. That is just the sort of thing that corrupts people, he would say now, although he knew that sin and corruption crept up in many guises. When he preached, there were things in this life he could draw upon that would make people sit up and listen. They would wonder how he could know as much as he did, a man who kept himself so pure and
at one with the Lord. It was that mysterious well of knowledge and understanding that drew the sinful to tell him their innermost secrets. Just like Billy Graham himself. Wallace was with a gang up north at the time Billy Graham came along. This was 1959. There was a girl who used to cruise with the crowd and hitch rides on the back of motor-bikes. She never had much to say for herself but Wallace could tell that he was the one she had set her sights on — she used to gaze at him with adoring eyes. One night when he had been drinking beer at the waterfront, she sat staring at him, tilting her breasts this way and that under a shocking pink sweater and dangling her legs over a bench seat in the park. He remembered her legs in particular, clad in diamond-patterned matador pants. She was looking and acting like a bad girl; it was time he gave her a lesson and showed her how really bad he was.