Songs from the Violet Cafe

by Fiona Kidman

  So that, when they cross Asia, Jessie nearly forgets to look down, as if she might see Bopha on a dusty street, waving out to the planes going overhead, but then, over to the left of the flight path, not far from the Equator, lie the green paddy fields of Cambodia between stripes of red dust and the glint of a city, a flash on the horizon. Bopha has married a young man called Tan with a sweet melancholy face. His family had come to see Jessie and the nuns, on an earlier visit. It felt like an arrangement, but Bopha insisted that this was the man she loved, and nobody else would ever do. They had met teaching school in the countryside that lay between Phnom Penh and Ta Pao in the north. ‘May my everlasting soul rest in peace, and may His Holiness never get to hear about this,’ Sister Mary Luke had muttered when, in keeping with tradition, the bridegroom had led his friends and family, garlanded with frangipani buds and bearing brightly coloured gifts, in a procession down the street, to beat down the door of the convent and take Bopha in marriage. A fat, lazy rain had begun to fall, and the people in the procession had had to put up umbrellas, rejoicing that the rainy season was coming. A good sign. There would be no honeymoon for Bopha and Tan; in the morning they went back to work teaching school in the bridegroom’s village.

  In the end, everyone is at Violet’s funeral who might be expected to come, except Evelyn, whom nobody has heard from, and the children of Felix Adam, who have never forgiven their father for marrying Violet. Once, long ago, the eldest daughter had sent a stiff note to Hester, saying she would never get a cent out of the family, because they all knew that Violet was carrying on with their father when their mother was still alive, but that was her style, and thank God her father hadn’t got round to making a will before his escapade in the mountains. They had sent money to bring their father’s body back from South America, but nothing for Violet, who’d had him cremated instead, and carried him in her hand luggage on a flight paid for by Hester.

  Now there is a small assortment of elderly people who claim to have been clientele of the Violet Café, several of Hester’s customers, some staff from the rest home, and Hester and Jessie and Marianne, and Belle with her new husband Wayne Geraghty. Wayne is a short dark man with a forest of hair poking up above his collar and tie. He’s been a real saver, Belle says, when she introduces them at the door of the funeral home. In retirement, he breeds racehorses and, as luck would have it, he was available for marriage when they met. What comes around goes around, Belle says fondly, although quite what she means by this is not apparent. She is dressed in a flowing turquoise and green garment, over a thickening girth.

  While Hester is speaking, someone else comes in, but nobody likes to turn round to see who it is. As Hester talks on, extolling Violet’s virtues, Jessie finds her thoughts straying back to Bopha’s wedding. Her head nods, the days of air travel taking their toll. Bopha has a British passport now, as well as her Cambodian one. She and her husband will come and spend time with Jessie in London, may even decide to work there a while. But she will always go back. As Jessie believes she, too, will keep returning. There is so much rebuilding still to be done.

  Marianne shoves her with her elbow. ‘Go on,’ she says. ‘You’re not going to let her get away with this. It’s open-mike time.’

  Time for those who have something to say, to stand up and speak. Jessie shakes her head, but the others are looking at her, as if this is expected of her. She finds herself in front of a small wooden lectern, and places her hands on each side, trying to think what she should say that has not already been said by Hester. In the second row, behind where she has been sitting with Marianne, sits a bald-headed Chinese man dressed in an immaculate suit, with fine gold-rimmed glasses.

  John Wing Lee.

  Jessie takes a deep breath while seconds pass. She finds herself ambushed with longing. This is the unalterable almost unutterable truth, that Violet Trench is dead, and now they have all been brought together to confront this fact, and each other. John rests one elbow in the palm of the opposite hand, and touches his mouth with one delicate fingertip, as if willing her to speak.

  Jessie says, ‘Several of us are here because we worked at the Violet Café. I first went there as a diner, late one lovely spring afternoon, when I was a girl. I’d run away from home and I was unhappy and hungry, and I chanced upon the café. The moment I set foot inside the gate, my senses were alerted to the powerful scent of flowers as I walked up the path. At first I could see that I didn’t fit the profile of the diner who Mrs Trench, for that is always what we called her, might have expected. Straight away she offered me a job, rather than a meal. But after some negotiation, I was seated and a young man flourished a menu before me, in the empty café. This may sound like a fairy story and in a way it was, because he brought me delicacies I had never experienced. They were the famous truffles of Perigord, and the taste of them placed me in a trance that has never left me.’

  Jessie raises her eyes. John sits like an effigy.

  ‘The young man led me to believe they had been grown somewhere around this town. Perhaps, although it would be astonishing if it were so. Soon after I had eaten, I agreed to become a waitress, because I had succumbed to the spell cast by the Violet Café. Very quickly, I learned of the divisions within the society of a restaurant, the differences between those who wait, and those who make. The kitchen, as others have remarked, is the centre of the restaurant universe. All the rest is simply the art of seduction, that which takes you there, and entertains you. After I’d worked there for a while, I went up in the hierarchy, when I moved to the kitchen. Cooking is all about whipping and beating and chopping and heat, in more ways than you could think.’

  She pauses to draw breath; still John has not moved, but then neither has anyone else. ‘All of us were troubled,’ she continues, ‘and Mrs Trench knew that. We were too young to know how to hide our feelings. She had experienced loss and pain of her own, and recognised ours. This was part of the power she exerted over us. All the same, I think she wanted to help us solve our problems — and so she might have, except that we were overcome by misfortune. It’s easy to think that if none of us had gone there to work, none of it would have happened.

  ‘Hester, I’ll always remember you skipping in Owen’s arms in the sitting room of your house and the way you looked at each other as if there were no tomorrows, and how truly sorry I am that there would be so few of them.’

  She takes another breath, and for a moment she thinks she sees David’s white face, and the wingspan of Evelyn’s eyebrows, but remembering that David is dead, and Evelyn a mirage, somewhere out there in the world, she sees it for what it is: an illusion, some trick of memory, brought about by distances and sleeplessness. And she has said more or less enough.

  ‘On the whole,’ she says, beginning to wrap it up, ‘I’d like to remember what it was like before the nightmare. Ever since I left, I’ve only to smell garlic, or pick up a menu that offers truffles, or even see a girl in an apron leaning against the wall of a café and I catch a whiff of smoke in the air and I think of the café. Tristesse, we might have called it in the romantic days when we were young, sorrow that was too much to bear, but also happiness. I think that if we had the chance to choose again, most of us would still have gone to work at the Violet Café. Those of us who survived, learned to live, one way or another.

  ‘Now, that’s all,’ she says, and bows briefly to the coffin. ‘May violets rain on you, Mrs Trench.’

  She waits for a moment, not for effect, but because her legs feel as if they might fold under her, or she might simply go to sleep where she stands. John is looking at her, his eyes seemingly veiled by light falling on the gold-rimmed glasses, and the thought flashes before her, that he may not know the true identity of the woman in the casket. He may never know. She takes her seat again.

  ‘So,’ says Marianne in her ear, as she sits down, ‘not a dry eye in the house. I hope you’re satisfied.’ She dabs her mascara with a damp handkerchief.

  When they have had what Hester calls
‘the refreshments’ at her house, it is still only two o’clock. John has apologised several times to Hester for his late arrival. His plane from Wellington had been delayed. That’s where he is based now, commuting backwards and forwards to business interests in Sydney. He and his wife own a house in Khandallah looking out over the harbour; he shows them pictures of the house, which has a pool and waterfall in the lounge and a roof that they can lift up so that the inside and the outside are all one. His wife, who is called Kittie, although that is not her Chinese name, worries about the grandchildren falling in the pool, and he supposes they will have to think about shifting soon. Perhaps to Sydney. He has given them all hugs, touching his cheek lightly against Jessie’s. She thinks she smells a whiff of something like vanilla, but decides it is his aftershave. He feels dry and a little bloodless. They stand around, taking care not drop their egg and parsley sandwiches on the Persian carpet squares.

  ‘A widow, a spinster and two grandmothers,’ Marianne says, in that light way she has.

  ‘And one balding Chinese businessman,’ says John. All his gold quivers around his wrists as well as around his eyes, a Rolex and a bracelet.

  Belle counts on her fingers. ‘We’ve got eight children between us, two of mine, not counting my stepchildren, three of yours, Marianne, and three of yours, John.’

  ‘Make that nine,’ said Jessie.

  ‘And I had Violet,’ said Hester, in a more humorous tone than usual.

  ‘I’m hoping my Shantee might come over and meet you all,’ Belle says. ‘That’s my daughter Shantelle, but nobody calls her that any more. I guess we all move with the times.’

  ‘What shall we do next?’ says Marianne. Because it is still early and nobody really wants to leave, but there are just so many things you can say after you’ve said hello, and what’s your job like, and how are the parents these days. (Marianne and Belle are the only ones with any left alive. Belle’s mother had been a shorthand typist until she was sixty-five, and her father had gone off to America, where he should be taken into custody, Belle says. As long as he’s not around to bother her, they’re welcome to him). There is nothing left of Violet’s for them to look through, no accumulation of books or scarves or shoes to exclaim over, no old clothes to sort for the Salvation Army, because Hester did it all years before when she first began expecting Violet to die. But she’d just kept going year after year. Not like a vegetable, no not exactly that, just an old woman who sat in a chair and endlessly smiled. As if making up for lost time. No clues to the past, no will, because there was nothing to leave, as Hester reminds them several times, just in case anyone thinks there might be some hidden treasure she has missed. Like the Violet Café, of which all trace has vanished, built over long ago by a hotel chain, Violet has disappeared too.

  Wayne has gone outside to smoke.

  ‘Jessie was right,’ Marianne says, ‘we all smoked like chimneys.’

  ‘No we didn’t,’ Belle says, ‘it was just you and Jessie.’

  ‘No, it was all of us, except for you and Hester,’ Marianne retorts. ‘You’ve forgotten Evelyn and David and everybody.’ Naming the names at last.

  Belle heaves a sigh. ‘I could do your colours,’ says Belle. ‘That’s what I’m into, these days. You could use me, you know, Hester, for sorting out your bridesmaids with their proper tones. You know, spring and autumn. You’re an autumn tone, Marianne, you’d look lovely in pumpkin and olive green.’

  ‘We could go on a truffle hunt,’ says Marianne.

  A what? They look at one another and laugh out loud, anything to laugh at.

  ‘Not joking. John, I want to know where she got the truffles.’

  ‘Out of a tin,’ he says, laughing harder.

  ‘No, honestly,’ Hester says. ‘She told me once, they were a present she sent to Hugo and Ming, don’t ask me why, but that’s what she told me. She sent the truffle culture to them by post. It’s what made your family rich.’

  ‘Yes, tell us where, John. Where is the black magic apple of love?’

  ‘Oh steady on,’ he says, running round the room, as if they are chasing him, and indeed, Marianne does have him cornered behind Hester’s lacquer and brass occasional table. He puts his hands up in front of him fending her off with mock horror. ‘Did I ever call them that?’

  ‘Well, if you didn’t there was a famous writer who did.’

  ‘Georges Sand,’ exclaims Jessie. ‘And there was another who warned priests and nuns that if they ate them, they couldn’t consider themselves to have truly kept their vows of chastity. It’s why I didn’t get to be a nun.’

  ‘And did you?’ John asks. ‘Keep them?’

  ‘Of course not,’ she says levelly. ‘I never made that vow in the first place.’

  Hester says, awkwardly, ‘They’re supposed to make you fat. Truffles.’

  ‘Well,’ says John, ‘if you’re set on this, how many cars have we got between us?’

  ‘But we might miss Shantee,’ Belle says.

  ‘We can see her later,’ says Hester, warming to the expedition.

  ‘Well,’ Belle responds dubiously, ‘I can always give her a tinkle on my cellphone. I think she’s going out this evening.’

  Wayne says this malarkey isn’t for him, but be his guest. What’s his is Belle’s and if she drops him off at their place, he can use her car if he needs it. Which leaves the five of them to make their way to the lakeside.

  It is a windless blue day. In a small bay near the lake they stand among a grove of oak trees, their branches providing a cathedral point of light above them. There is nothing else to be seen, beyond the trees, except a stretch of wasteland, and the remains of a door which had been burned long ago, on top of a pile of rubble, half covered with creeping ivy. The gardens are long gone.

  ‘Where then?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You do.’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ says John. ‘You wanted to be taken for the ride.’

  ‘We should have brought some dogs. Or some sows to smell them out.’

  ‘I can see Wayne letting me take a pig in his car,’ Belle says. It is a Honda Prelude, painted bright yellow, because, according to Belle, it is a true spring colour, which Wayne has chosen to reflect their joint auras.

  ‘You don’t know, do you, John?’ Jessie says. The others have gone down to the lakeside, abandoning the search in favour of skipping stones. Marianne is winning.

  ‘No,’ he says, stretching himself against the trunk of a tree. She sees that it’s an effort to straighten his shoulders, that he has become bunched like all of them, and shorter than when she first knew him. ‘I never did. Perhaps they did come out of a can.’

  ‘You’d know the difference. The one you showed me that first day, it was fresh, I’d swear.’

  ‘You’ve forgotten. I hope you’ve been happy, Jessie.’

  ‘Happiness? Ah, that. Who knows, until the end?’

  ‘Well, you do know,’ he says, ‘I’ve examined the end pretty thoroughly. I thought I’d bought it, just out there on the lake. I’m one of the survivors, as you called it, but I haven’t forgotten what it’s like to stare death in the face.’

  ‘I do know what you mean.’

  ‘Do you? Really?’

  ‘Oh yes, yes I do. Out East, I learned all about that.’

  ‘I’d heard you were famous, of course. But I’m afraid I don’t follow much in the papers except the business pages.’

  ‘Well, fame is neither here nor there. The things I do that nobody hears about are more important to me these days. Like spending time with my daughter Bopha. And yes, that is happiness.’

  ‘You know, Jessie,’ John says, rubbing his shoulders slightly against the tree, as if that will ease the tension between them, ‘I have this strange persistent dream. I dream that I knew Violet long before my father first took me to meet her.’

  ‘Well, that’s odd,’ says Jessie. ‘What else do you see in the dream?’

  ‘I see her rowing a dinghy,
which is absurd, because Violet never went near boats. And I’m in the boat with her, looking at her. I’m small and cold and wanting her to stop rowing and just talk to me the way she always does.’

  ‘Well,’ she says slowly, ‘I guess that’s where memory lives, inside our sleep.’

  ‘What are you saying? That this is real?’

  ‘I’m just saying, perhaps you should treat it seriously.’

  She thinks that if there is ever a moment to tell him the truth about Violet, this will be it. But even as she is standing there, turning over in her mind whether to tell him or not, and wondering if it will seem like a vulgar piece of gossip she can’t resist, the others return.

  The five of them eat a meal together in a courtyard café, hanging with vines coming into leaf. Stars are coming out and a chill little wind plays off the lake, causing them to pull their jackets more closely about their shoulders. They are drinking a crisp sauvignon blanc. They touch glasses.

  ‘To us,’ they say.

  ‘We survived 9/11,’ says Marianne, an edge in her voice, ‘we must be indestructible.’

  Only Jesse is silent for a moment. She has been to enough wars, doesn’t see where it will end.

  ‘We passed the millennium, isn’t that amazing?’ Belle says, and they toast each other again. Belle’s cellphone rings at that moment.

  ‘Oh, I am sorry,’ she says, pulling it out of her handbag. ‘Shantee, darling, where are you?’ she says. ‘You know I did want you to meet my friends. You’re doing what? Shantee, you can’t. No seriously, darling. Darling, this is your mother talking — this is a very bad idea. No, I want you to please reconsider this.’

  She lays the phone down by her plate. ‘Silly girl, she’s gone over with her hubby and the kids for a bonfire.’ The others had forgotten it was Guy Fawke’s night. ‘They’re burning a boat or something. Round the point, at the old Messenger place.’ She says this last part artlessly, as if it doesn’t hold great meaning for her. Jessie realises they must have driven past it earlier in the day.