Songs from the Violet Cafe (30 page)

‘You’ve got a thing about adoption, haven’t you?’ Bopha said.

‘Well, I was adopted once myself, and it wasn’t a great success.’

‘Is that why you never adopted me?’ Bopha asked.

Jessie glanced up at her, startled. ‘Partly,’ she said, slowly, ‘and partly because you’ve been raised by the nuns.’ There was another reason, of course, but she didn’t want Bopha to know about Lou, and the way she had sought him out again to find the nuns. The way her knowledge of Lou had dogged her footsteps. ‘Well, you know, I was a single woman too, not necessarily the ideal mother for you. Would you have wanted me to adopt you?’

Bopha’s eyes were full of tears. ‘I didn’t think you wanted me enough.’

‘Bopha, that’s not true.’ Seeing how upset the girl was, she said, ‘It’s not too late, I guess.’

‘D’you mean that? Would you?’

‘Are you planning to adopt me?’ Jessie said.

When Bopha said, ‘Yes, I want you to be my mother,’ Jessie’s heart lifted, as people’s do when they are nearing the end of a journey.

Jessie looked for Caroline for a long time. After she had been to New Zealand to see Violet, she searched telephone books and electoral rolls, and placed an advertisement in the
Times
but nothing happened. All of this was intense and time-consuming. At some point, she decided that it was all too much. From then on, she put aside three days a year which she called her Find Caroline days. There had been an accumulation of these days, years and years of them.

She was shopping with Bopha in Harrod’s for a new evening bag, when something happened that made her stop looking. The Atchesons were holding a retirement party for Brian in their Hyde Park apartment that evening. Brian was taking an early retirement. Jessie sensed a disappointment that he had never made it to ambassador status. There would be more time for their grandchildren, they said gamely.

Bopha had wandered away from her side, interested in acquiring a new duvet. She was always cold in London at the beginning of each trip, even when it was summer. Jessie picked up a bag that took her eye, looking inside to check the compartments, and glanced up, seeking a saleswoman. Instead, she saw a woman standing beside her, checking the beadwork on another bag. For an instant, Jessie took her to be Violet, the Violet she had first known, or perhaps a little older. Only the hair was different, a stylish ragged bob; otherwise she could have passed for her, a trifle haggard and thin, but beautiful, the kind of woman who would attract attention anywhere. An artist of some kind, Jessie thought, for she wore a bright silky jacket, and her fingernails appeared to have a trace of paint beneath them. ‘Caroline,’ said Jessie. ‘Is it you, Caroline?’

The woman straightened up, startled, and looked at Jessie with a cool stare in her blue eyes. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I don’t think we’ve met.’

‘Are you by any chance Caroline Trench?’ Jessie asked. ‘I mean, was that ever your name?’

The woman, who had seemed momentarily frozen to the spot, lifted one expressive eyebrow and her shoulder, in a half-shrug, much as Violet would have. ‘I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.’

‘But you’re Caroline?’

‘My name is Caroline May,’ said the woman. ‘Now if you’ll excuse me.’

‘I’d like to give you my card,’ said Jessie. ‘I’ve been looking for this person for years. Perhaps you could ring me if you ever hear of her.’

‘Please go away,’ the woman said, her tone flat and cold. ‘If you
don’t, I’ll call store security.’ She walked away from Jessie without taking the card.

Your daughter is alive, Jessie wrote to Violet. She is an artist and a very beautiful woman, and I’m sure you would be proud of her.

She didn’t think Violet would hear this letter when it was read to her. From what Hester wrote, Violet didn’t give the impression of hearing anything much any more. Nobody really knows what she hears now, she had said in her last letter. Jessie thought that if she could hear this message, it would be enough.

It’s hard to believe anyone could have lived that long. As if Violet Trench couldn’t master the art of dying. Yet in the end she has done it, after ninety-five years of living. She went like a lady, the woman at the rest home tells Hester. No complaints. She wasn’t one to complain. Hester says this at the funeral, her cheeks glowing with pride. She is the one who has seen Violet through it. More or less. Hester wishes she had been there when she died, but all of this has been going on a very long time. Goodness, it’s twenty years since she first caught Violet putting washing powder in the peas instead of salt. And they all know how it is, you simply can’t be in the right place every time. Hester is just glad she has been there for Violet. Bless her. She’s been a wonderful woman, who’s played her part in all their lives.

‘Sanctimonious claptrap,’ hisses Marianne, seated in the front row beside Jessie. They are in a small chapel attached to a funeral home. The casket in front of them is made of the best dark wood, decorated with a spray of Prince of Wales violets, the big strong variety.

Hester has rung everyone who she thinks ‘ought to know’ that Violet has died, not that she expects them to come of course, those who are too busy or too far away.

Jessie rings Marianne to cancel lunch because she is flying out to New Zealand that evening. Marianne is not one of the people Hester has contacted. ‘You’re crazy,’ Marianne says, because it is only a week
since Jessie flew home from Bopha’s wedding in Cambodia. ‘You’re too old to be traipsing all round the world the way you do, you’ll get blood clots.’

When Jessie says briskly that of course she is going, she might be old, but you’re only as old as you let yourself be, Marianne says, ‘All right, calm down. I’ll meet you at the airport.’

‘You’ll do what?’ says Jessie. ‘I don’t believe it. You haven’t been there for nearly forty years.’ Jessie is referring to the town, not the country, because she knows that from time to time Marianne visits Sybil in New Zealand. The whole subject of Sybil is closed to her. Marianne behaves as if she had a perfectly normal childhood; her mother is an engaging and elegant old woman, much loved by her grandchildren.

‘I need to make sure the old witch is really buried,’ Marianne says of Violet, ‘besides it would be a bit of a gig, wouldn’t it, you and me, just like old times. We are travelling business class, aren’t we Jessie? If you’re doing any of that crazy economy stuff, I’ll upgrade you when I book.’

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.’