Songs from the Violet Cafe (29 page)

‘You’ve probably worked out who Caroline is,’ Violet said, at last. ‘I expect Hester has too.’

‘Another of your children?’ Violet appeared to flinch. ‘A daughter.’

‘You heard that I had a child?’

‘A son, I was told.’

‘Who told you that?’

‘Lou Messenger.’

‘Aaah.’ Violet expelled a long breath. ‘Lou Messenger.’

‘You knew he was alive?’

‘There’ve been rumours, of course, for years.’

‘I met him in a downtown bar in the middle of Phnom Penh, just after the Vietnamese drove Pol Pot out of the city. He exists. Well, he did then, though it’s a fair while ago. He thought John Wing Lee was your son.’

‘Well, what can I say about that?’

‘That it’s true?’

‘Oh yes, it’s true enough. I still feel badly I suppose, about trying to hold you back when I did. I took advantage of you, your awkwardness and your neediness, of you wanting John as much as you did. I can say that, now that you’ve turned out so well. You’re quite dashing, Jessie. Oh yes, I admire what you’ve become.’

‘Please, don’t make a speech,’ Jessie said. ‘You didn’t ruin my life.’

‘Well, it wasn’t my son I asked you to come here and talk about. Or your ruination, which clearly never happened. Although it has to be said that the summer when you girls all worked for me at the Violet Café, made great changes in people’s lives, and some of them were intolerably damaged. Don’t think I have no regrets. I’ve done enough damage to my own life. But I did see that it wouldn’t have worked out for you and John. Your landlady brought in the library books you’d left behind. I don’t know why she couldn’t have returned them herself. But when I looked at them I understood that it wasn’t just because of your mother that you’d gone that night. You would have tired of the life.

‘What I’m leading to is the question of choice. You see, Jessie, I had to choose between one child and another. At least, that’s how it seemed at the time. I took John to Hugo, who had been the first real love of my life, only at the time when I was in love with him, it didn’t seem right. It seemed sinful even to think like that, because his wife was dying, in the room, between us, inch by inch. So I went away. I wasn’t entirely without principles in those days. I met a man when I was a student at the music school in Versailles. I’d gone to Paris for the day. He was a soldier from England — when being in the military meant having a career — a well-off, fastidious, and rather arrogant man, but we had some good times together when it started. He gave me an excuse to drift away from music and follow what had come to interest me more, the pursuit of good food and good living. I decided to marry him, not that there was much choice — I was having his baby. But it did ease the longing I had for Hugo. Of course, my new husband had to take me home to meet his family. They didn’t like me from the beginning. They thought of me as his little colonial, like Katherine Mansfield, you know, the bourgeois girl on the make. Not that I was any girl by then, of course. Oh, I’d lived you know, I expect they saw that. The halls in the house where they lived were lined with pictures in gilded frames, of all the relations who had gone before, not like those of a tin canner’s daughter from New Zealand. But soon we had a girl. Caroline. She was picture-perfect, like one of those children in the advertisements for Pears’ soap — long blonde curls tied back in
a ribbon. She showed early signs of artistic talent, much greater than I imagine I ever had as a child. We doted on her, her father and I, but not on each other. His family’s view of me soon made its mark.

‘The war was a relief. My husband went away and I was free in a sense. Caroline had her grandparents, and I started to go to London more and more often, on the pretext of helping with the war effort. It’s hard to explain what it was like, the nights in the shelters, and everyone close together while the bombs went off. Not romantic, like some people have painted it, but terrifying and bleak. I met a young man who was so different from my husband, and Hugo for that matter. Or perhaps I was influenced by the knowledge that Hugo had mended his heart quickly after I left New Zealand too, with Ming, the woman from China. I’d been intrigued by this news. Perhaps that’s why I couldn’t stop looking at this young man who had come to London from China to study, and hadn’t been able to return when the war broke out. He was staying with relatives over a fruit shop in Clapham Common. His body had a smell about it that I find hard to describe. I think of lilies or lemons or truffles, although it was not any of those, but something tart and sweet and altogether mysterious.

‘Of course, the inevitable happened. We made love — in bomb shelters, in the room that I had taken, close to where he lived, everywhere. We went off into the countryside when the summer came. I’m ashamed to say this, but it was as if Caroline didn’t exist, perhaps because she was part of my husband’s family, whom I’d come to detest.

‘Had I forgotten Hugo? I suppose so. I can’t really remember now, my mind’s clouded about this. Hugo had set me on a path, and this was where it had taken me.’

‘I can’t help asking, but do you think you were really in love with Hugo?’ asked Jessie curiously.

Violet stiffened opposite her. ‘I beg your pardon. I loved Hugo all my life. What makes you ask?’

‘I met him. It just seems surprising.’

‘You met him the night he died.’

‘All the same, there’s a difference, isn’t there,’ Jessie persisted,
‘between loving someone and being in love with them? Even though you can do both. I can see I’ve offended you. But you’re a woman used to getting what you want. In some ways I’ve modelled my life on what I saw in you. Headstrong and independent. I think if you’d wanted him so badly, you would have stayed behind.’

‘You’re talking about you and John, aren’t you?’

‘I suppose I am. Perhaps I’d have come back. But I thought he was dead, that’s the difference. Lots of us carry round romantic images of what might have been, but they’re hardly ever true, don’t you think?’

Violet plucked in an agitated way at the rug that covered her knees. ‘You couldn’t possibly have modelled your life on mine.’

‘What did you expect when you began the job of changing us? Whose image were you offering us?’

‘I wanted you to look in the mirror and see yourselves, that’s all. That wasn’t so bad, was it?’

‘No,’ said Jessie truthfully. Because what Violet said did make sense. ‘Why don’t you just tell me what happened next?’

Violet sighed and fidgeted again. Jessie saw how exhausted she had become, as if age washed over her in waves.

‘I became pregnant again. I wanted this. This is a gift women seek from men who truly intoxicate them, to be filled with their children, to show the world, to be rich with the fact of what they have done together, how deep the man has gone. It’s the ultimate possession. And then, of course, they don’t want it, don’t need it, have to give it away because it was never theirs to have in the first place. I’ve heard stories about Belle Hunter. Well, I believe them. She got what was coming to her, and I don’t hold it against her. She got what she wanted from Lou, the same as I took from my lover. She didn’t need any presents from me.

‘But I was in a fix, of course. This was a long time ago. The war was on, I had a husband, and a daughter who somehow I’d mislaid, everyone knew that I hadn’t seen her father for a long time. Time went by and I started living over the shop in Clapham Common with the baby and his father. I wrote a letter to my mother-in-law. I said I’d had to go home to New Zealand because of an illness in my family.
Or perhaps she suspected the truth. The last time I’d gone there I was already some months along the way with this pregnancy.

‘I wanted my little girl again. I loved the boy, but I couldn’t have them both, I’m sure you can see that. I took him to a children’s home and left him there for a day or two to see whether it would work, but I couldn’t do it.

‘I formed a plan in my head, to hide him away somewhere where I could get him back later on. And that’s what I did. I took him to Hugo. Perhaps you’re right, it may have just been his constancy that drew me to him, but it’s hard to let go of one’s illusions at my age, Jessie. Anyway, that’s one side of it, what happened to John. The other is that my husband’s family made sure I never saw Caroline again. My husband had come back while I was away, years had passed, and he had begun divorce proceedings. A scandal for his family, but they had to act quickly, I understand that, punish me for my desertion. I went to the house. They must have seen me coming. They wouldn’t let me in. Caroline’s not here, they said, but I was sure that she was. They said they would call the police if I came back, and I believed them. I felt that I must vanish or this girl of mine would be caught up in an endless tug of war. I worked in the restaurant trade again, this time learning a few cooking skills, doing front-of-house in a smart little French place in Soho, and from there I went to Sydney and ran a place near King’s Cross for a bit. Closing in on my boy, as it were, until the moment was right. Then I came back here, as I often did, and I met this remarkable girl, Hester, who knew it all, a self-taught original. She made it all so easy, she and Hugo. Extraordinary.’

‘She’s amazing all right,’ said Jessie, privately reflecting on Hester’s martyrdom. ‘So where’s John now?’

‘Oh, John, he’s around somewhere.’ If Violet knew, she clearly wasn’t going to tell Jessie. Perhaps, Jessie thought, she didn’t want to admit that she didn’t know.

‘This isn’t fair,’ Jessie said.

Violet said then that she’d lost touch with John when she went to America with Felix Adam. She had thought of marrying Shorty Toft,
but she was saved from herself. ‘He cut off my account at the shop, you know, when I said I needed time to
think about his proposal. It was just an excuse of course. Poor Shorty wasn’t up to all the rumours flying round about the café.’ For a moment, she almost smiled. It was strange, she said, the amount of malice that humorous men sometimes harboured. ‘I was quite grateful to him for that bit of spite. It put some spine in me, when it came to Felix. I’d decided to go for nothing but the best.’

Jessie closed her eyes, trying to recall the laconic doctor and his waxy-faced wife, and found it hard to be convinced.

‘John had his own family,’ Violet said. ‘They cared for him after the accident. I had thought of him as dead, like the others, but he wasn’t. Nobody bothered to tell me for three weeks.’ This was how she put it, that his family had closed around him, kept him hidden and maintained silence. She had supposed that the brothers were sending her a message — that he didn’t belong to her. When asked why they did it, they had told the police that they couldn’t read English and didn’t know that John was missing. ‘It was rubbish, of course. Perhaps I was wrong to try and lay claim to him again. Still, I’d had him for a little while. And now I want you to find Caroline for me. Eh, Jessie? How about it? I think you’re the right person.’

‘I don’t know about that. I’m not a detective.’

‘Oh, you can do it all right, you’re good at asking questions these days. If you would do me that one favour.’

‘John might still want to know about you. More than Caroline.’ From where she was sitting, none of it seemed like a good idea.

Violet sighed, her eyes suddenly tired. ‘John had a mother. It’s best left. Caroline didn’t. I want you to try and find her. You can’t imagine what it’s like to lose a child.’

‘Well, yes I can,’ said Jessie.

‘Oh well, then you must tell me about it sometime.’ Violet closed her eyes, her head fell forward and, in the space of a blink, she was gently snoring, her crooked hands clasped across her stomach.
Marianne rang her one morning. She was back living in London. ‘I’ve heard on the grapevine that Lou’s dead.’

‘Where was he?’

‘Up in north Thailand.’

Jessie had known that Lou was long gone from Phnom Penh. He’d been robbed too many times to make it worth his staying. ‘He wasn’t all bad,’ she said.

‘Good riddance to bad rubbish. You should do something about Bopha.’

‘Is that why you’ve rung me? To tell me the coast’s clear.’

‘Well, it was never not clear.’

‘That’s not what you told me.’

‘I just think it will be easier. Anyway, Bopha’s old enough to know what she wants, isn’t she? Hey, I’m taking Alannah to the zoo, do you want to come with us? We could feed the monkeys.’ Alannah was Marianne’s first grandchild.

‘I’m not mad about zoos,’ said Jessie, who had had to leave restaurants in Cambodia because of caged sun bears, chained and grieving. Saving sun bears had become one of her causes.

‘Well, they’re interesting places. Never mind. So shall we do lunch? Go to a movie? Would you like to be a lady who does lunch with me, Jessie?’

‘Sometimes,’ said Jessie.

In the end, it was decided that Bopha would go to high school in London, and back to Phnom Penh during the holidays. This was less trouble to arrange than Jessie had expected. As if it might have always been a live possibility. At first, Jessie was designated her guardian. She had decided that the time for a more formal procedure had passed, that possession was not what Bopha would want.

One Sunday morning, Jessie sat in the apartment, surrounded by the morning’s newspapers. Bopha came out of the shower, her head wrapped in a towel, her face shining with steam. Soon she would be seventeen. She had grown long-legged and slim, and moved with a slow, elegant grace. Like a dancer, Jessie thought. Or a nun. She was trying to decide whether to go back to Cambodia the following year, or to go to university. Privately, Jessie hoped university would win out, that perhaps she could go back later, if that was what she still wanted,
but Bopha must decide for herself. I want you to make up your own mind, she had said more than once.

‘What’s that you’re reading?’ Bopha asked, coming to read over her shoulder.

Jessie folded the newspaper over. ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Oh, never mind, it’s some frightful story about a Russian adoption gone wrong. These kids who are adopted out of their own countries get into some dreadful difficulties. It’s not as if they can go back.’