Songs from the Violet Cafe

by Fiona Kidman

  China? How did she die? Did she get killed there?

  No, no, it was afterwards. And at that point, Irene Pawson would stop, as if she had gone too far. As if the dead war correspondent’s death was something so unspeakable that it must be put to one side, and not thought about again. Nobody Jessie knew had killed themselves but, with a fascinated horror, she suspected that this was the secret. But surely this was not what her mother thought about as she stared into space and let her tea grow cold. Her daughter wondered if she might be thinking about Jessie’s own father, the thin-faced airman with the corporal’s stripe, rather than about her stepfather Jock Pawson.

  In the late afternoon, the day before Jessie Sandle left home, she encountered a group of young women from university. She had just collected her satchel from the store cloakroom where she worked, and was heading out to catch the bus on Lambton Quay, her head held high as she marched past the china department. Jessie didn’t mix with these girls much, for they seemed more free-spirited than she knew how to be. But she was embarrassed by Miss Early’s stinging rebuke, and it suddenly seemed better to be leaving with friends. One of them, a girl she remembers as Alicia, linked her arm through hers and suggested they go to the movies. They were good-natured young women from country towns where they had earned scholarships, or their parents (or at least their fathers) were already in the professions and fancied the novelty of daughters who might shine before marriage. They lived in bedsits, and looked intense and serious, worn from lack of sleep. All of them recognised each other as clever. You had to be to have come as far as this. Cleopatra was showing at the Embassy, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, although the idea of Elizabeth Taylor in this role seemed slightly ridiculous. Her nose is too short, somebody remarked cleverly, and they all laughed.

  ‘Antony shall be brought drunken forth,’ Jessie cried, inspired by their wit, and for a few minutes everyone laughed so hard she felt as if she fitted in.

  They agreed that they deserved a night off thinking about their legal studies. First they would drink coffee at Suzi’s, and then see what came of the evening. And Jessie thought it sounded lovely, that she would like nothing better than to spend her birthday with these clever capable girls who were managing their lives so well.

  In the end, she turned down the invitation. She remembered her mother and her promise of a treat for her birthday, and decided that she would go home and endure the sticky buns and ‘special’ dinner she supposed her mother would have cooked.

  She walked along the Esplanade at Island Bay before turning up the steep incline of Brighton Street. The house was close to the sea. The sky was dark gold; beneath it a fleet of fishing boats cruised into the harbour. She heard the snatch of a song. Although she had lived for a long time among fishermen and their families she knew hardly any of them. At school, some of the children who were not Italian talked in whispers about how the fathers had been locked up in the war because they were Italian, only nobody said it out loud because, it was said, the Italians wanted to forget. In summer, she saw bright rows of vegetables over the fences, red and yellow peppers shaped like inverted bells, and purple aubergines. Catholics, her mother said, and left it at that. Jock was more blunt. Leave the Eye-ties to themselves, he told her. You don’t want to go running with spies, just because you’re getting educated. His voice was heavy with meaning: keep your mind on your work. It occurred to Jessie that her mother and Jock could be wrong about the Italians although she didn’t deny they seemed dangerous — that was the only word she could think of. She thought the Italians at the bay were beautiful, the women luscious, olive-skinned and curvy, the men stocky and hard-muscled.

  One of the men called out to her. Gidday, Jessie. He had been in her class at primary school, although he was older. Hey Jessie, how you going? Hi Antonio, she called back, and kept walking. Even though the wind was cool his shirt was open three buttons down, showing the soft curly black hair that sprouted on his chest. A gold chain quivered against his throat. He had special help with reading and mathematics when they were in school. Now he looked prosperous and certain. She had heard he was already promised to someone. She decided, for no reason that she could fathom at that moment, (except that it was her birthday and she was eighteen), that she would ask her mother for the photograph of her real father, which she knew she had hidden. She would say it in front of Jock. The photograph would stand on her dressing table.

  The last time she had seen it, it was stowed at the bottom of her mother’s underwear drawer, beneath the frayed bloomers and cavernous brassieres and shrivelled woollen singlets, the one place where Jock might not be expected to search for a missing sock (though in truth, there were some of those too, bundled in with laundry that had been folded too quickly or carelessly). Jessie hadn’t dared look in the drawer since she was last caught by her mother when she was eight. There was something else private in there, a small black box containing smooth rubbery pellets that looked like bad sweets. Uncharacteristically, her mother punished her, first with a slap, then with banishment to her room and, finally, as if to make the point absolutely clear, the cancellation of the school picnic. (But — there was always a but in the stories about her mother, the qualification that made her wince and yearn for her real mother, whoever she was — it was probably her mother’s failure of nerve to appear at the school picnic where other mothers with slim bodies and long legs wore smart slim line bathing suits. Jessie knew now what the suppositories were for but she sighed when she thought how useless they were. Jock Pawson’s sperm had too often found its snaky way into her mother’s uterus. Jock worked as a clerk in one of the government ministries in town, Internal Affairs, which Jessie thought sounded unhappily like the story of her mother’s life and her sorry body, in its increasing state of collapse.

  That night, that last night at home, Jessie’s mother met her at the door. Jessie saw at once how dressed up she was. She wore a polished cotton dress, drooping a little in the hem of its circular skirt, and a white cardigan. Her eyelids were painted an odd hectic green, her mouth scarlet with lipstick. A handbag dangled by its strap from her wrist and she clutched a pair of white gloves. At forty, Irene Pawson’s complexion was too pallid to be healthy; her black hair, cut straight across the bottom, was pushed back behind her ears and held in place with hair clips. Jessie felt a sudden rush of love and moved to give her mother a quick hug. But even as this tide of affection was welling up, she felt, also, an anticipatory dread.

  She saw that everyone else in the family was wearing their best clothes too. Grant, Belinda and Janice stood in a row, full of expectation, Grant’s hair slicked up in a cowlick, the little girls wearing starched blouses with their tartan skirts. Behind them stood Jock, still in his work clothes, his tie in place, the newspaper unread on the dining room table.

  ‘I’ve ordered us a taxi,’ her mother said, her voice excited. ‘I’ve booked us a table at Garland’s for six thirty. We’re going out for tea.’

  Jessie’s heart sank. ‘Mum,’ she started. And stopped. How could she have thwarted a plan so artfully conceived? Besides, the ugly chintzy room was full of unfolded washing and the children’s toys and her mother’s piles of half-read books. The air was thick with a familiar smell that made her want to throw up, the dark and horrible contents of her mother’s gut that she flushed down the lavatory several times a day. Nothing to be done about it, the doctor had said, an irritable bowel won’t kill her. Tell her to get more exercise, he’d advised Jock. Irene’s ailment seemed worse when she was tired, which was most of the time, or like tonight, plain excited.

  ‘Your mother’s been expecting you for hours,’ said Jock. He was a tall man, slightly stooped, with sandy hair and a gingery beard that he pulled when he was displeased. He had married in middle age and had money to pay for the house they lived in. The record of his life he brought to them was one of saving and frugality. He was the kind of Scotsman who was born counting money; he did not expect to change when he married and he hadn’t.<
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  ‘I should change my clothes,’ Jessie said.

  ‘Throw a scarf on, darling,’ her mother cried gaily, ‘you’ll be just fine. Oh, isn’t this fun.’

  Garland’s was upstairs above Manners Street, near that part of Wellington where drunks and derelicts quarrelled and took shelter. The room was brightly lit by hanging shades that threw a merciless glare on the diners. You could choose roast beef or roast lamb with three vegetables, or fish and chips, and for dessert apple pie or ice-cream sundae — three scoops of ice cream in a boat-shaped glass dish with a choice of strawberry or chocolate topping. The children banged the handles of their knives and forks up and down on the table and sang a song they had made up that went Cabbage cabbage never mind the damage/cabbage ca-BAGE, never mind the DAMA-AGE. They sang this regularly at home even when there wasn’t cabbage. Between the main course and dessert, Jessie unfolded the presents that the children had dutifully wrapped: from Grant, a small bottle of rose water that Irene must have helped him to buy, from Belinda, a crochet-covered coat-hanger (had she done it herself? Belinda wriggled and blushed), a handkerchief and an impressionistic drawing of a boat on a flat blue sea from Janice, the baby, who had started school at the beginning of the term.

  ‘They saved their pocket money for those,’ Jock said, pulling furiously at his beard. (Not true, not true, Irene had saved for the rose water, the rest they had made.) He wiped the corners of his mouth with a napkin and sat back. His sister Agnes, whom Jessie was expected to call Aunt Agnes, had joined them by now. Her present was a small silver-plated spoon with an enamelled picture of the Milford Hotel at the top, wrapped in tissue. ‘One of my treasures,’ Aunt Agnes remarked to them all. ‘I went there when I was a new bride. You don’t see things like that too often in a lifetime.’

  Thank you, thank you, and thank you, Jessie said to each of them, you’re all so sweet to me, so kind.

  ‘She could just about pass,’ Aunt Agnes said to her mother, with almost a hint of approval. ‘She could just about be Jock’s own daughter. You can see her and Belinda, they’re quite alike.’ As much as anything, Jessie might eventually blame her defection on her mother’s children who held traces of herself.

  ‘Happy birthday, darling,’ her mother said, her face flushed from its usual pallor. She had eaten off all her lipstick with the roast potatoes.

  ‘Well,’ said Jock, ‘I suppose you expect me to pay for all this lot.’ It was meant as a joke even though Jock didn’t think it was really funny. Jessie could see that.

  ‘Please,’ her mother said, in a low voice. Jessie could see then the effort it had cost her mother for them to come on this outing. Jock scooped some of his leftover ice cream onto Grant’s plate.

  ‘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.

  SYBIL AND MARIANNE

  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 cam
e 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.