Songs from the Violet Cafe (5 page)

‘I'll take you out then,' he said. ‘What do you want to do?'

She had suddenly looked nervous. ‘I have to be home by ten. I'll get it if I'm not.'

He hated the way she was backing off. Teasing him, he reckoned. ‘Decide for yourself, we can get together or go to Billy Graham at the park.'

He could have sworn she would have opted for sex, she had been hanging out for it now for months.

‘I'll take Billy Graham,' she said.

His mates jeered when they left. He tapped his forehead and grinned so that they would know she was about to get what was coming to her. Only, he knew he wouldn't do it to her. He just didn't fancy her enough, or perhaps she scared him a little. She was an unknown quantity, the sort who might make trouble if you called her bluff.

At the gates to the park, thousands of people were moving forward. The girl reached for his hand but he didn't pick it up, didn't look back to see where she went or whether she would go into the park without him. But a current of excitement in the air was infecting him, like that feeling of electricity that seemed as normal as breathing when he worked with it; it was just that when he put down his tools
for the day and folded away the wires, there seemed to be nothing there inside him. He felt in his bones that something was going to happen, as if the vacuum was about to be filled.

When he saw the grey-suited man with the handsome lantern jaw (this was how the newspapers described it), and heard him begin to speak, he knew he was right. I'm going to ask you to do something hard, the man said. It's hard and it's tough but you can do it. I'm going to ask you to get up out of your seat, and come on this field and stand here quietly, reverently. Come now, it won't be difficult. There will be hundreds of you, and you know as I speak that it is not me who speaks to you, but God. God has spoken to you. You get up and come. I can hear it in your hearts. You want a new life.

Wallace looked around for the girl but she was not there. She had brought him here and she should, he thought, at least share this moment. He looked across the sea of faces, intent, raised and watching the man. When he twisted around, seeking the girl, people raised their fingers as if he might break the spell. He was going to have to go to God on his own. You want to be clean and wholesome for Christ, Billy Graham said. The Lord has spoken to you. Now you just get right out of your seats and come on … come on … you are not on your own, your friends are coming with you.

In the background a choir robed in white had begun to sing
Just
as
I
am,
without
one
plea,
dear
Lord
and dear Lord, he was on his feet and going towards the man.

And, after one quick glance backwards, he never looked back. After that, he knew only pure women and girls, like Belle Hunter, the pastor's daughter.

Once he had walked off on his journey towards eternity, his old friends behind him, things happened quickly. He bought himself a grey suit of his own and several snow-white shirts so that he could be sure of having a clean pressed one every day, he put a carnation in his buttonhole, and had his fair hair, which his mother used to call golden when he was a child, cut short back and sides. Preaching was a gift he never knew he had in him. When he stood up and told people about the things he saw, about the magnetic forces of electricity and the way
it was all part of God's plan to light up every corner of the world, from the darkness of Africa and its benighted people to the black soul of the big cities where evil resided, it was like magic.

He was invited to preach in a town further south, where a man called Hal Hunter was conducting a prayer meeting. It was winter and there was rain in the air which combined with the rising volcanic steam at the edge of the racecourse, where the meeting was being held, to create eerie mists and shadows around them. He shivered inside the new double-breasted coat that he wore over the grey suit. Then Hal began to speak and told them about the Church of Twenty, which was his very own creation.

Twenty seeds are all I need, he told them. Each seed will go forth and find twenty more, and each of those another twenty, and the word of God will spread like wildfire. You'll hear it in the streets and from the mountain tops, you'll hear it spoken by the wise old men (not a word about wise old women) and children. It will be the song that carries us all forward until the end of time and the new creation. You hear me?

We hear you, the crowd called back. Then Hal called on Wallace to speak of his experiences, and the way the light had been turned on for him, and before long everyone was shouting
Praise
the
Lord
every time he paused for breath. He knew just how well he had done when Mr Hunter invited him home for supper. His daughter, who was called Belle, was only fourteen at the time but he fell in love with her on the spot. Belle rode in the car beside him on the way back to the Hunter place, Mr Hunter driving and Mrs Hunter beside him. Belle had big blue eyes that you noticed straight away, very fair hair that she wore long and wavy round her shoulders. As soon as they went into the house, she went to the kitchen and began helping her mother lay out a supper of sausage rolls and custard squares.

‘Sir,' he stammered, unable to find the words to express how delighted he was by Belle's appearance, without giving offence. He saw how young she was.

Hal looked him in the eye, as if seeing right inside him. Wallace blushed, aware that what the pastor saw might be interpreted as carnal
desire, a terrible shaming lust for the child, and that the recognition of this stain on his soul could be his undoing. ‘She'll make a good wife for someone,' he said.

Belle's mother, whose name was Lorraine, paused from her work for an instant, tight-lipped. ‘She's too young to make a promise,' she said, in a low quick voice.

‘I beg your pardon,' Hal said, a blaze in his eyes. When she didn't answer, he said, ‘I think you should go to your room, wife.'

Immediately, and without another word, Belle's mother laid down the last of the food and walked out of the room. Wallace glanced at Belle to see if this had upset her, but she seemed undisturbed. She knelt by the fire and poked at a log of wood. Wallace felt excited and stirred by what he had just seen. He could tell that Hal was a man who knew what he wanted, what was best for everyone.

‘She's a very good girl,' Hal said. ‘You like this man, Belle?'

‘Yes,' said the girl, keeping her eyes downcast, but Wallace saw a smile hovering at the corner of her mouth.

‘You'll have to teach her to be a good wife,' said Hal.

‘Yes sir,' Wallace said. He wondered how much he would be allowed to teach her before his marriage and how soon her education would begin.

‘You got any money?

‘Not much, sir.'

‘I thought as much. You need money for a ring when she leaves school. A girl needs a good diamond, tells the world she's worth it to a man. Like a down payment,' he added, grinning. ‘You have to be able to support her.'

‘Oh, I can save up,' said Wallace. ‘I've got a trade. I only preach weekends and evenings as a rule.'

‘Good man. Don't take any nonsense from her. I take too much from that woman down the passage there. She had too much freedom before we found the Lord.'

Wallace just nodded. Now that the washing up was finished, Belle picked up a piece of needlework and sat down beside the fire. Wallace felt helpless, already so in love with his child bride.

‘And you keep pure for the wedding, you hear me. No messing around. A goodnight kiss is quite far enough.'

‘Yes sir.' Wallace couldn't believe God was being so good to him. Later in the night when the house should have been settled in sleep, he heard a thud and a scream inside the house, a voice muffled. He understood that the man was the head of the house and Belle's mother needed discipline. Belle, swaddled in a long winceyette nightgown, had come to him and demurely offered her cheek for the first of his kisses. He wanted to kiss her and kiss her until she fainted in his arms.

Out on the street or even in the house helping her mother bottle preserves and cook and clean, she was so quiet you couldn't hear her move from one place to the next. Her mother had bruised and brooding silences of her own, but Belle's silence seemed to reflect a happiness he hoped he had inspired. She let him kiss her a great deal, on her lips and on her neck and on the tops of her sweet white breasts. The day before she turned fifteen he gave her the ring, because she was finishing school the next day and she wanted the girls there to know that she had her future mapped out and waiting; it was the first and last triumph of her school days. By this time, Wallace had given up his trade and only did jobs for friends of Hal's. The rest of the time he spent learning the Scriptures and preaching with Hal here and there around the countryside. The husbands of Belle's older sisters were his new friends, amiable smiling young men called Joshua and Albert. One of them was a drainlayer and the other worked in a menswear shop, and when they weren't at their jobs they helped to find more seeds for the Church of Twenty. Already the sisters and their husbands had seven children between them.

Wallace had enough money saved in the bank for a deposit on a house when he gave up regular work, but there were weeks when the ministry didn't offer much by way of a living. Hal said Belle could take a job for a while, as long as it was something humble. She first took a job at a boarding house near the end of the main street, cleaning bedrooms after the guests left. In the evening she came home smelling of carbolic soap and toilets. When she heard about a job washing dishes at the Violet Café on the waterfront, she asked her
father if she might try out for that. It was a den of harlots, her father said; he'd heard about the kind of women who hung out around that place. Then there was trouble in the boarding house. A man ran amok with an axe and Belle nearly got her head sliced in two. Hal and Wallace went to see the woman who ran the café. The woman was all lip and very impudent in Hal's opinion, although Wallace rather liked her. I make the rules, she told them, and Belle will obey what I say when she comes to work at the Violet Café; she could worry about their rules when she went home. They waited for her to show them around but she didn't, just waiting for their answer with a take it or leave it look in her eye. In the end, Hal said Belle could go there and work for a few months, until she was married, now that they had set a date for the wedding. Belle was sixteen by then. Her older sisters were thinking about their matrons' outfits already.

‘I reckon she's about as ready for things as she'll get,' Hal said, as they drove home from the café. He looked at Wallace speculatively.

That night he did take her at last. When they first lay down together he thought she would be afraid but she put both her arms around his neck and pressed her cheek against his, as if being in bed was the most natural thing in the world. He plunged into her with the urgency of a man who has come to his last gasp, yet with a tenderness that surprised even him. Only it didn't feel like breaking and entering, and afterwards he sensed that she might have been disappointed. He told himself this was only natural, he supposed the reality was not what most girls expected. All the same, this is what they did every night from then on. She would rest her head on his shoulder while they slept, her hand sometimes stroking him as if to give him comfort. Nobody seemed to mind, although he couldn't be sure what her mother thought, as she never said. Sometimes he sensed her, when he was drifting off to sleep, walking up and down the house.

It surprised him how much Belle liked her job in the café. One of the girls was getting married soon, just like her. Hester said she could help Belle with the dresses for her wedding; she was terrific at sewing. They were ever so busy at the café. Everyone, except one girl called
Marianne, was pretty nice to her, although the boss kept them all on their toes, and you had to be quick with the pots and pans or the cooks shouted at you. But that was all part of the job and you had to understand the pressure everyone was under to get their jobs done in time and keep the customers happy. He wondered about the place then. His image of a kitchen was a plain serviceable room with a sink and dirty plates, much like the one where Belle worked alongside her silent mother. What could be different about it? Sometimes when Belle came home late at night and he was lying in bed waiting for her, he heard her kick off her shoes and hum to herself, or even sing little snatches of song. It unsettled him, knowing that Belle was moving out there in the world beyond. He remembered the wicked girl who had tried to lead him astray. Or had she been wicked? She had led him to God and then disappeared like a phantom. Perhaps she had been some kind of angel. At any rate, he had been led there to Belle and her people and her people's people. Belle was his star, his private beacon, his dazzling little mistress. Untouched by the world.

‘You should give up work now,' he said one morning, after her third late night in a row.

She was washing dishes, running them under the hot tap to rinse them, polishing them on the tea towel with painstaking care, as if washing dishes was the most important thing a girl could be doing.

‘I like it there,' she said.

‘You'll have to stop soon.'

‘Why? It's money in the bank.'

He knew she was proud of the growing line of figures in her Post Office book. ‘You'll have the wedding to see to. And we might have a baby next year.' This had just occurred to him, but he was enchanted at once with the idea, seeing it immediately as the thing they needed to do very soon.

‘We're not even married yet,' she said, scoffing at him.

Her overbright stare embarrassed him, her eyes were so big and blue. ‘We could have. I mean, we could have any time.' Now that he had started on this train of thought, he could see that it was one thing to have sex with Belle; it was another for the young pastor and his
bride to be with child (how he loved that biblical phrase) on their wedding day.