Songs from the Violet Cafe (31 page)

‘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.

‘So what’s she up to?’ asks Hester.

‘Some fool idea about putting their old stuff in the boat and pushing it out in the water. She’s put her wedding ring in.’

‘She can’t do that,’ Hester says, looking distressed. ‘I did her wedding.’

‘I know. But that was a long time ago,’

‘Well, I thought she and Geoff were doing all right.’

‘They are, she just gets ideas in her head sometimes, I don’t know where they come from.’ Belle’s hand hovers over the phone, her expression distracted.

A choral group of about ten or twelve sits at a long table next to theirs. They are practising a song they are to sing in a competition the following weekend. Jessie calls out and asks them to sing some more, because in this outdoor environment, the old etiquette doesn’t seem to apply. Or perhaps it was just a quaint notion that doesn’t apply any more. And because they have been asked and they are young and cheerful people, they practise a medieval tune that is a cross between keening and singing. John sits beside her, slightly aloof, as if he is remembering another time when they sat side by side and is afraid that something may be expected of him. Jessie feels him wishing that he hadn’t come, perhaps preferring his own company. The tension she sensed beside the lake hasn’t gone away. She can tell the music isn’t touching him, that he is focused more on his own unresolved discord.

‘Can you sing that song about even though it’s snowing, violets are still growing?’ asks Hester, who knows a couple of the group. One of them is booked in for a dress in February.

‘You were a February bride,’ says Jessie.

‘So I was. Not that I was much of a bride,’ Hester says, giving a small girlish hoot of mirth. She reddens and blinks away a sudden tear. ‘It’s the wine,’ she says.

The choral group don’t know the song, and, because the meals have been delivered at both tables, the singing ends, and conversation falls away.

As the darkness deepens, rockets start hurtling through the night sky. People emerge from the houses and move towards the lakefront. Out on the water, a trail of fire slinks across the water.

‘That looks like a boat burning out there now,’ Jessie remarks.

Belle looks as if she’s going to cry. Her cellphone rings again. ‘Shantee? What are you doing, baby? Are you coming over here? You’re what? Oh.’ Her face lights up with relief. ‘Never mind, another time, I’ll tell them you’ll see them next time they’re in town.’ As she switches off, Belle says: ‘Silly girl, she’s all wet, she’s been wading round in the water.’

‘Did she get the ring back?’

‘Yeah,’ says Belle, ‘it was all a joke.’

Marianne asks, ‘How did Lou get out of the forest, Belle?’

Jessie thinks, so that’s why she’s come all this way. After all these years. Marianne and Belle had embraced at the door of the chapel as if they were old friends, apparently without any traces of their old rivalry. But she sees it has not been forgotten.

Belle, who is eating scallops cooked in a Drambuie sauce, puts down her fork, and wipes her mouth, smiling in a dreamy sort of way.

‘Wallace and I went and got him,’ she says. ‘Of course.’

‘Wallace did that? I thought he beat you,’ says Marianne.

‘Well, that’s not the point, is it?’

‘What is the point, then?’

‘Wallace really loved me. He’d have done anything for me, you know. Poor guy.’

‘I don’t get it,’ Marianne says. ‘Sorry, I just don’t.’

‘The nature and meaning of love,’ says Jessie. ‘Well, it’s a bit late to be getting deep, isn’t it?’

There are general exclamations about the lateness of the hour and the early starts some of them will have to make in the morning. Under the slipstream of words, Jessie says to John, ‘I think you should take notice of that dream of yours.’

‘You know something about this, don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I do.’

‘So if I knew Violet before, who was she?’

‘I think that’s something you need to find out. I should warn you though, that if you do, you’ll also have to find out who Hugo was, and who he wasn’t, and the complications will only have just begun.’ She fishes in her bag, and finds a business card. ‘Here’s my email address. Get in touch if you like, though I don’t know a fraction of the answers.’

He smiles slightly. ‘Long distance.’

‘That’s close enough,’ she says, and it’s amazing the way the past slips away, and it is possible suddenly to be free of it.

Between the mains and the desserts the choristers are humming, like an orchestra getting tuned, or a swarm of well-fed bees. A firework explodes near them.

Soon, in half an hour at most, they will give each other a hug for what will surely be the last time. Jessie anticipates the moment when John will hold her just a moment longer than the others, pressing his suit against her jacket and long skirt — or perhaps he will just slip away, the same elusive John. She smells gunpowder, so close that she could be out East again.

‘To us,’ Marianne says, and their hands touch in a final toast.

A Catherine wheel spins along the pavement. Out on the water, the ship of fire drifts on, collapsing inwards on itself as they watch, causing Belle to exclaim and clasp her hands together.

‘Thank you,’ says Hester. ‘Thank you all for coming.’

Fiona Kidman has written more than 20 books, mainly novels and short stones. Her novel
The
Book
of
Secrets
won the Fiction category of the New Zealand Book Awards, and several others have been short-listed. She has been awarded a number of prizes and fellowships, including the Mobil Short Story Award, the Victoria Writers Fellowship, and the OBE for services to literature. She is a Dame Commander of the New Zealand Order of Merit.

The author lives in Wellington with her husband, and enjoys travelling, the theatre, and reading.